It's that little tiny area at the top left of this photo. The piano lived in it while we were raising the house. Originally the proper front door to the house was off to the right of that little window, and the area where the piano is sitting would simply have been the entryway where you would turn a hard left to enter the house.
The piano stayed in there (and was joined by a pedestal fan) when we painted the walls and redid the floors...
But because that teeny weeny little 2 metre by 1.5 metre space was entirely wasted as an entryway (particularly since we've opened up a new extra-wide doorway straight from sleepout/verandah to lounge), we decided that it would serve us much better as an ensuite in the future (the master bedroom shares the wall on the left there). So the piano moved out and that doorway got mostly covered up by bookshelves when I furnished the lounge room.
Even back when we still weren't living in the house yet we had a few complex planning discussions about its layout, with an office chair playing the role of stand-in toilet.
In such a small space, every centimetre makes a difference!
So the placement of the door that we have yet to cut in the wall to the bedroom is of utmost importance, since we have to position a shower, basin and toilet around it. It doesn't look like much, but this is a future door frame post.
Allie took an active part in the discussions.
And even tried to weigh in on the heated argument about which direction the toilet should face.
We even taped things out on the floor to see just how squishy things would be.
And that's as far as we got. For a long time.
But as we were contemplating how our new door opening in the lounge wall would work, we realised that we should contemplate the ensuite at the same time, since it's just off both rooms. We drew a very not-to-scale drawing of the sleepout, with the ensuite on the far left. The office doors are marked on the bottom right, the lounge doors in the middle.
As you can see from the little arrow at the bottom of that diagram above, our grand plan requires there to be a flat wall where that door opening currently sits, partially hidden by bookshelves (as seen in the furnished picture of the lounge above). Hopefully that makes sense!
So, first step toward an ensuite with walls where they need to be is to fill in that doorway (which is also a bit of an eyesore from the lounge room side)! Technically, that just involves making a timber frame to fit inside the existing doorway and then attaching VJ boards to the lounge room side of it. But of course nothing is quite that simple for us!
This is the little diagram we made of the proposed ensuite layout, turned 90 degrees from its position in the drawing above.
The big nearly-rectangle space on the left there is going to be our shower. And its far left wall is the wall currently leading to the lounge. The one that needs filling in.
So that design required a frame like this, with a big gap up the middle.
My poor obliging husband got to work building the frame, using a mixture of timber we'd salvaged from elsewhere in the house and some new cheap pine (which is much easier to work with than hardwood, let me tell you!).
And it fitted perfectly!
Just like in our other bathroom, we will need to put up fibro boards to cover up the existing timber walls so that the tiles have something to stick to, so we had to build the depth of that board into our frame measurements, plus the depth of the tiles themselves and their glue. Hopefully this will mean that there will be just enough room for my little feature tile strip in the centre of that gap.
And then my dear obliging husband started attaching VJ boards on the lounge room side of the frame. We made the decision to simply cut them to the height of the existing doorway (which meant we could salvage some we'd taken from other places in the house) rather than pulling out the top ones and putting in full ceiling-height boards. Obviously that makes an ugly seam in full view where the two sets of boards meet, but there's a plan in the works to solve that problem. More on that later.
It always amazes me how fast the job gets completed when we're up to VJ board stage! Here, we're nearly finished, dealing with a particularly warped board adds a bit of time. And you can see from above that this was while our new lounge doorway was still in progress.
Here's the view from the other side of the wall, in the ensuite. Can't you imagine my lovely feature tile strip running up the centre of that frame?
So then came painting stage. We undercoated, and now here's Tom slapping on the wall colour (Dulux Sandy Day Half in Solver paint). A coat of paint makes the world of difference! But you can still see that ugly seam.
And so stays our ensuite, for now!
The new wall in the lounge room though? I've got big plans for that! In fact, there's a hint as to what we're doing with it in the pictures at the end of this post.
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