Adding a Bedroom (and Property Value) to Our House!

If you remember back about a year, I shared this post about buying our house. We bought a new house and are the first home owners/occupants. However, we bought standing stock because we weren't willing to wait 3-4 months for the house to be built. The downside to that choice was we didn't really get to pick any of the fixtures/options/paint etc.

The people who "built" our house backed out of the house at closing and that's how we came to see the house. That couple had picked all of the options for the home. One of the upgrade options on the blueprints (you can see below) was turning "bedroom 2" right off the Master's suite into a "Master retreat." They chose to do that. Troy and I knew buying the house that that was wasted square footage for us. We are not people who hang out in our room. Ever. We don't have a TV in there. We don't want a home gym (gross) and neither of us work out from home. We have a loft upstairs for another hang out area/TV area, so this master suite was literally a room that we never went in. Optimus used it the most because he slept in a chair we had in the corner.



We began talking soon after moving in about what situation our family would be in to wall that room in again. Having more kids was one of those options. Our guest room is downstairs and living in Vegas, we knew we would have lots of visitors (and we have). It was important to us to keep our kids/noise away from guests and we didn't want them to share a bathroom with kids toys, diapers, and toddler pottys in them. So we knew that if we were going to have 3+ kids, we definitely wanted to wall in the room.

Some people would LOVE this space as a master retreat. We just don't need it. We are definitely living room couch loungers. As far as resale/rental potential down the road, most people that we know have 2+ kids and we know a few families (HI BRIE) who might be moving here and want to rent a house with lots of bedrooms. So we're hoping that having 5 bedrooms makes that a selling point for the house as a resale or rental.

Which brings me to the next point. We are having twin girls. Yes, they are sharing a room. At least for a while. The other bedroom in the blueprint (bedroom 3 in the corner) we are reserving for a future Aupair/guest room. We have a credit at a furniture store and in the next few weeks, we are going and getting unstackable bunk beds for the twins in the future, but for now, those can be used for a nanny or as a guest room. Aunt Kathy...we are doing this while you are here. YAY furniture shopping!

We wanted the twins near us and far from Avery (she has the room over the garage) for noise purposes. So the girls are getting the new room right next to us.

Here is the before view of the room, from our bedroom into the "retreat":

Here is after the wall went up:

And this is as the room is now:

If you stand on the other side of the wall, in the new space, this is what you see. You are looking at the new closet:

Standing where the closet is and looking back towards our room, here is the before:

And this is with the wall up. We are starting to get stuff moved in there and out of Avery's closet. It's a bit of a mess. But you get the general idea. We are sticking with the Eric Carle theme of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" like Avery's nursery. We really loved it and it's gender neutral. The wall stickers have made it through 3 different rooms now and are still plenty sticky. Definitely worth the money :)

Here is the before angle looking from the window to where the new doorway went in:

And after with the new door:

And here is the before picture from out in the hallway where the door went in:

And here is the after:

We are really happy that we decided to put the wall up and the doorway in. If we had the option to build our house instead of buying standing stock, this is what we would have picked anyway, so I'm glad we went ahead and changed it. And it's nice to start nest a little bit for the girls :)

We still have a little furniture rearranging to do. We ended up getting rid of Avery's crib because it was a drop arm (and she's a climber) and it didn't convert to a toddler bed either. We wanted something for the 2 girls that was would be 1) safer and 2) have a longer lifespan of use for them. When we get the cribs we will be doing a little furniture jenga in there to figure out the best arrangement for a dresser, 2 cribs, a glider, and a bookshelf. When everything lands in it's final spot, I'll get you guys an update.