Our Owner's Suite Remodel

It's coming up on nearly a year of owning our Victorian house and we're making decent progress on the list of projects we had when we put the offer in. 

Our biggest project is (was, now) the owner's suite. Having one was on our list of "must haves" for house hunting and while this house didn't have one when we bought it, we saw it had the space for it. Our conversation with contractors started as soon as we closed on the house, meeting 6 in the span of a week. After we considered whether to start at all during a pandemic and with us both working from home, we eventually got going on construction in June and wrapped up in November. 

Before 

This was the "master bedroom" or just the biggest bedroom. You can see some built-in cabinets in a hallway that led to the family room to the right, and off camera to the right was a small closet. To the left is the old chimney chaise.

We tore out the wall between the back of the closet and the family room and converted this space into the new bathroom and walk-in closet.

An upstairs living room (or 4th bedroom) that had doors both to the master bedroom and the upstairs hallway. With all the other spaces in this house, we didn't think we'd get much use out of this space as a family room. We used this as an office before the remodel and moved it up to the 3rd floor during the remodel. The office has since been split amongst the spare bedrooms on the 2nd floor and will go back up on the 3rd floor once we get the mini-split installed next spring. 

Still the upstairs living room, showing the attached laundry room and closet. 

We walled off the laundry room and the other part of this room is now the bedroom.

Laundry room alcove.

Demo and Framing

Getting all the demo equipment in. 

The little closet in the bedroom.

Built in shelving.

We taped out where we expected the walls to go from the design, though those had to change when we realized the loadbearing wall was not the one we expected. While we had originally planned to move the laundry room to the basement and use that space for an office, the load bearing wall change meant it would have to be either a quite small office or quite large laundry room and we ended up leaving it as a laundry room. 

Protecting the house from demo dust.

Parts of an old newspaper from 1908 that the contractors found. The floor had 3 layers - a tongue and groove one we tore out to be replaced (it sadly had to be replaced rather than refinished), the original wide plank pine floors and then the subfloor. These were between the top two layers so we suspect the tongue and groove was installed in 1908. 

After the floors had been torn out.

Framing in the new linen closet.

Looks like the old chimney had a stove. We used the chimney as a chaise for the plumbing. 

The design

Our remodeler was a designer in the sense of layouts, but not an interior designer, and I had never made this many selections before. With this being such a completely blank slate, including a completely new bathroom, it was difficult to get started on design. 

We wanted to keep it fairly similar in style to the rest of the house, with a somewhat Victorian/older feel. For instance, the other two bathrooms both have hex tile floors with patterns. Both of the other bathrooms had black accent tile, though, and I wanted to switch it up with blue. I looked at many different floor patterns and we couldn't agree on anything we saw that made sense in a not perfectly rectangular space, so ended up going with somewhat randomly placed blue tiles on the floor and a diamond pattern in the shower. 

For the cabinets, we went with a dark birch. Paint colors were tricky (again, such a blank space!), but at least with the bathroom I had the blue tile to work with. I also loved the beadboard in our existing upstairs bathroom and made sure it was in this one as well. 

The result

From the hallway, you enter into a small hallway in the suite with a door to the bathroom on the right, a sliding door for the closet straight ahead and then you enter the bedroom area to the left. 

It was weird to watch them haul this super tall linen closet into the house! 

Love how big this shower is and the quartz bench. The niche is super tall, too, and it actually fits all of our things! 

We went with just one sink because we preferred more counter space, and not cleaning two sinks. This countertop took quite a while to pick out - it's a quartz that's a light grey with a blue grey pattern. The sink is the exact same Kohler that's in the other upstairs bathroom and it's huge.

The walk-in closet.  

Pretty basic organization for now, and we're still trying to figure out the best way to organize this space as Mike has never really had a walk-in closet and it's been over 6 years since I've had one.

Hallway to the bedroom area. 

Not a whole lot design wise here, other than the paint color. It's Sherwin Williams Silvermist and it ended up being closer to the bathroom's blue grey than I'd planned, but I like that it feels colorful yet still fairly neutral. 

While usually not a very exciting room, I really like our laundry room now. The flooring and wall color (SW Chelsea Mauve) make it feel cute, yet it's very functional with tons of space. 

It's been so nice to finally get moved into the new suite! The work turned out so well and the space feels like it fits the rest of the house. Having a closet again has been great, even if I'm not exactly wearing much of my wardrobe - especially shoes - right now. 

After almost 5 months of construction, it's great to be done. While worth it, working from home in a construction zone wasn't always easy and we were so ready to get our space back with such little opportunity to get out of the house this year, particularly as we originally had expected to be done by September. 

We're trying to tackle all our major projects for this house right away so we can enjoy them as long as possible. Next up is the fireplace. The fireplace itself has already been installed, and the mantle and tile are a work in progress.