The Master Bedroom
The floorplan shows the "after" version following all of my renovations.
"Master" is being generous: my new queen bed just fit—not that it mattered. What did matter, however, was the tiny clothes closet: the size wasn't a problem; the organization was. It was quite typical: clothes rod and shelf at the top, and additional shelves at the bottom. Except... I had no full-length dresses to hang, just some shirts. And my back didn't care for the idea of having to stoop to get at everything else.
So, the very first project I undertook was to completely strip everything out of the closet, and reinstall it all, with the shelves at the top—spaced to accommodate my little storage cubes—and the clothes rod near the bottom, with just enough room to hang my shirts. Below left, before; below right, after.
Incidentally, that blue object to the left of the closet is the electric panel enclosure, which was doomed from day one.
As for my bed, like many other things it went through changes. The headboard looked intriguing online (above), but in person it was merely strange. Its structural design was also quite poor. I decided to build it as intended and use it anyway, until one morning in December I awoke with my arm stuck down between the mattress and the headboard. That was it; time to re-design and re-engineer the thing.
In about an hour I had it completely dismantled, and then about a half-hour later I had a "new" headboard (above), which is attached to the wall. As a bonus, I regained a fairly significant amount of floor space, since the original headboard pushed the bed away from the wall by almost a foot. Another bonus was a bunch of leftover lumber, which was repurposed as closet shelves.
Another thing I did in the bedroom was inspired by a lighting effect I'd added in my woodland home: a rope light under the edge of the floating bed (above left). Alas, I didn't have a rope light long enough, and I wasn't inclined to buy another one, but I did have one the right length to put behind the newly-(re)built "floating" headboard (above right). That it was blue suited me just fine.
Meanwhile, after living here a year, and being annoyed by the ceiling lights the whole time, I finally reached the point of doing something about it. Ceiling lights are bad enough, but the low ceiling in the bedroom made it worse: at less than seven feet, the lights were practically in my face. So on 23 October 2023 I pulled the lights out (below left) and installed a wall sconce by the door (below right).
Now I have a nice large, clean, unbroken space on which to render a starry night sky... someday... maybe...