Built-in work/storage area in spare room

Years ago my wife and I renovated our home by building a new master bedroom and bathroom on a newly constructed 3rd floor. The other objective for that project was to give my younger son a bigger bedroom since he was still in the nursery.

I created my house in HomeByMe to give you a rough idea of the before an after of our big project from years ago. As you can see, the master bedroom was the largest room on the 2nd floor followed by my older son's room.

In order to build and make use of a 3rd floor, we need to add some stairs to the 2nd floor and the best option we could come up with was to bisect our old master bedroom with the stairs. This left a nice smaller bedroom which is comparable size to my older son's room.

So in the revised plan below (our current 2nd floor) you can see there is now another smaller room on the other side of the stairs where the closets used to be. We tore out the closets to make this room bigger and more usable.

Since we have had this new configuration, we have struggled to find the best use for this room. At first we wanted to make it a laundry room but the doors and halls in my house are way too small to get a washer and dryer up into that room.  We even looked at if we could bring the units up through the exterior window but that was not working either. We had access to water on the other side of the shared wall with the bathroom, but there was no easy way to vent a new drain in this room without other major work.

During the Covid lockdowns in 2020 my wife did remote teaching from this room while both boys went to zoom school in their bedrooms and I working from the home office.

We have many needs in our small house where this room could be very helpful including:

  1. We have no closets on our first floor so this room could help with jackets, boots, etc.
  2. Our kitchen lacks a lot of cabinets / storage so this room could function a pantry.
  3. We need a working area with a large table for homework and other projects.
  4. We could use another bed room on the occasions we need one.


Built-in Storage Console

My latest thinking is to design and construct a built-in console for storage and working and possibly can double as a hide away bed.

This photo shows the inside of the room and you can see the zones in the floor where the closets used to be.  My plan is to construct this built-in to fin in the area where the closet used to be so that it will require a minimal amount of repair to the walls and ceiling.

The unit will be mostly made from furniture grade plywood and will feature some deep shelves that run along the top for storage for non-perishable food and other pantry items. Each end of the unit will have tall cabinets to hang jackets and clothing on one side and have drawers on the other for more storage. In the middle between the cabinets will be a desktop that can be used for all types of work, projects, homework.  My thought is this could potentially be folding and possibly could be lowered to make room for an inflatable mattress for overnight visitors.


Next steps:

I will start planning out this console using the Makers package, specifically I will use xDesign to draw out the room and each of the wood parts to prep for a material and cut list. 

More to come...