Attic in progress

As requested, here are some photos of our soon-to-be office, in our attic.

Some background first: We have a full attic with a full (albeit very steep) staircase from the second floor. Long before we moved into this house, someone had turned the attic into 2 small rooms. They put up dry wall, hung doors, created closets, put in pretty nice moulding, and even put some cheap carpeting and linoleum down. We think the rooms used to be very small bedrooms. In addition to these rooms, there are dormers, which are unfinished. While you can stand up and walk around with no problem in the main part of the attic, you sort of have to crawl in the dormers - the roof slopes downward there. The attic also has 2 full windows.

Before Annika arrived, we had been using our third bedroom as an office. We constructed bookcases and had our desk, computer and filing cabinet in there. Now that she's here, we want to move the office stuff out so that we don't disturb her when we want to use the computer or desk.

Our ultimate vision is to completely renovate the attic. We want to take down all the walls and turn it into one large room. With a couple of sky lights and some HVAC work, it could actually be a really nice bedroom. We would probably be able to see the Town River from the sky lights. We hope we can eventually put in a half-bathroom up there too. But this will all be more money than we want to spend right now, particularly given the uncertainty of my job right now. So until we can do this, we decided to do a quick fix-up of one of the rooms in the attic and move our desk and computer up there.

While I was in Buffalo, Jim cleaned out the front room in the attic. He patched up a couple of large holes in the dry wall that our contractors had made when they were doing duct work for the bedrooms. He also started painting the walls. Yesterday, we got an electrician to come in and put in a couple of outlets, wire a switch for the overhead light in the room, put in telephone service, and put lights in the dormers. Today I washed down the stairs and hallway floor. Tomorrow Jim is going to try to finish painting the walls and I will clean the carpet in the room. Hopefully by the end of the weekend, we'll be all moved in up there!

So here are some photos of our work in progress. Here are two views of the staircase. First, from the second floor (you can also see the very bottom of one of the attic windows):

And heading down the stairs from the attic:


The next photo is of the hallway with the 1930's linoleum. We are going to use the room off the left of this hallway for the office. On the right of this hallway is the door to one of the dormers. We are using the dormers for storage space. The door at the end of the hall (with the weird opaque glass) goes into another small room, which we are also using for storage at the moment.

Next is the view of the new office from the top of the staircase. You are looking through what used to be a window, complete with glass. We removed the window, posted it on Craig's List and someone took it away. You'll see that Jim patched the wall. We still have to paint it.

Opposite view, from the office to the top of the stairway. You can see the closet door on the right.

The room (complete with the new outlets, as well as our paint cans and drop cloth):

You can see a large patch job on the left side of the wall. There used to be a huge water stain there. When we had our house inspected, before we moved in, the inspector sort of freaked out about that until he saw that it was an old stain and it wasn't wet anymore. Still, we were glad when we got the roof replaced.

There also used to be a door to the room, similar to the door you saw above, with the opaque glass. But there was a huge crack in it from top to bottom. It looks like if you slammed it a couple of times, it would become separated from the hinges. So we took that down and also posted it on Craig's List, and someone took it away.

I'll post more pictures once it's finished and we're moved in up there.