Every house has one. A room that made sense when you moved in and doesn’t anymore. In this case it was a home office: a wall of built-in shelving, a desk, and not much reason to walk in there. What the client actually needed was a place to put guests.
They’d already been working through ideas with their contractor, and the two of them brought me in for a consultation. We had a computer rendering to work from, and I added my own input on the build details before anything got cut. The finished room came out close to that rendering, which is exactly how it should go. The time you spend getting a design settled before demo is the cheapest time on the whole job.
The shelving unit ran wall to wall, so two sections came out to make room for the bunk. Pulling built-ins always leaves you with a mess underneath. Bare subfloor where the flooring was never run, a raw cabinet end panel that was never meant to be seen, no baseboard. All of that got addressed: flooring filled in, new baseboard, the exposed cabinet end panel refinished, moldings repaired and painted. Then the walls. Shiplap siding went up and got two coats of paint in a deep navy, and crown molding was installed and painted to finish out the top.
The upper bunk is built from white oak, with finish material covering every visible surface. It’s framed into the room rather than set against it. Instead of a ladder, we built a staircase with real treads, a real handrail, and footing you can trust in the middle of the night. The stair risers were finished with the same shiplap siding as the walls, so the stairs disappear into the room instead of reading as a piece of furniture that got shoved into the corner. That was a deliberate choice, and it’s the detail I’d point at if you asked me what makes the room work. The lower queen bed was built and stained to match the bunk above it.
Then there’s the part you don’t see, which is where a home inspection background earns its keep. A new switch was installed to run the sconces on the wall above the bunk and the three lights centered underneath the upper bunk, so someone sleeping up top has their own light and someone below isn’t lit up when they don’t want to be. The wall outlets in the lower section were relocated behind the nightstands. That sounds like nothing. It means the queen bed sits flat against the wall with no cords running across the floor and no plug fighting the headboard for space. Nobody who sleeps in this room will ever notice it. That’s the point.
The remaining built-in didn’t get left half-done either. Four custom drawers were built into the lower section, faced in white oak to match the bunk, stained, and fitted with black hardware. Guests get somewhere to put their clothes, and the white shelving keeps the wall from going heavy against all that navy.
Nothing here was structural. No walls moved, no additions, no permits pulled. One underused room in an existing house, and now it sleeps four with storage built in.
If you’ve got a room like that (a formal dining room nobody eats in, an office that’s really just a place mail goes to die, a bonus room over the garage), it’s worth a conversation. I service La Grange and Fayette County, and I’m happy to come look at it and tell you honestly what’s possible.
