A Constructed Life

Letting Go of Perfection; Part 2 of 3

By Liz January 12, 2009 Bedroom Remodel 4 Comments

Welcome to Part Two of How We Created a Master Suite! Where did we leave off on Monday? Ah yes, that’s right. Demo, dirt, sweat and grime. And this photo.

It’s amazing what a few 2X4s nailed together can do for a girl’s mental state. Once we started framing, I felt like the project was achievable, like the end was already in sight. Little did I know, the end was still a year away. Here’s the new Master Bath framed out.

Just as I was envisioning walls and paint colors, I realized we still had quite a bit of work ahead of us…like building an entire bathroom. We began with the shower pan. To this day, I am still amazed that we actually built our own shower pan. Here’s a piece of advice on shower pans: When designing your bathroom, make sure your shower is a standard size so that you can use premade shower pans. Don’t just build the walls and then say, “So I guess that’s the size of our shower. I wonder if anything fits that?”

When we needed a break from the master bath, we moved on to framing the closet in the bedroom. To date, this is the biggest closet I’ve ever had.

My darling father did all the electrical work in the master suite. When this photo was taken, we hadn’t had electricity on the second floor in over 7 months. This photo also shows the new, bigger, sturdier floor joist we put in the attic and the new subfloor we installed. It was delightful to have a ceiling again, but nothing compared with light switches that actually worked.


The building inspectors came through and with baited breath we waited for and earned their approval. We exhaled with such force that it would’ve sent The Three Pigs running. On to the next step – insulation and vapor barrier! What a pain in the ass. Insulation, though so worth every moment of hell, is not fun to install. Especially when it’s 90 degrees out and every inch of your body is covered in fabric to prevent an extreme case of itching. And I mean really, really extreme. Like even your esophagus itches. I’m not exaggerating.
And then! Then! Once the inspectors approved the insulation, it was time for actual walls. Real. Solid. Opaque. Walls. The space finally felt like a room. But I have to say this, we will never, ever do our own drywalling again. Not only is it a tremendous time commitment, it really takes skill. Although I’ve seen worse drywalling jobs than ours, I can freely admit that our work is not good. You can see the tape in a few spots. And seeing the tape is not a good thing. For the sake of our home’s aesthetic value, our days of drywalling anything larger than a closet or small bathroom are over.

Finally, it was time for paint. We selected a combination of browns and tans, trying to keep things relatively neutral cause we’re hoping to move in a couple years. One hour after my mom and I finished painting the room (Joey was out of town), the floor guys arrived to transform the worn, ratty 95-year-old fir floors from dingy boards to beautiful, glowing pieces of wood.


Ah! What a moment! The room was really coming together at this point. All that was left to do was hang all the trim, get new windows, a new door (there’s a tiny porch outside the room), caulk the trim, paint the trim, finish the closet, finish the bathroom…oy, we still had a ways to go.

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