Saws Don't Belong in the Bedroom

Since we first drew up our plans for these house renovations, the original entryway to the house has been earmarked as an ensuite for the master bedroom. Here's what that entryway looked like ages and ages and ages ago, back when EVERYTHING was still yellow.

But for years now, its primary function has been as a little storage room for tiles, air conditioners, doors, suitcases, and every other thing you could imagine being piled in there.

 
We then closed in that main opening into the lounge and put in some built-in bookshelves (which we IKEA-hacked).

So for quite a while the only opening into that room was the original doorway to the sleepout. Here's an ancient photo of it back before we even bought the house. The front door is straight ahead on the right, the doorway to our ensuite/storeroom is a bit further to the left, with the hinged window above it. You would then turn a hard left to enter the lounge room (although not once we closed that wall in, obviously!).

Anyway, perhaps now would be a good moment to get back to the matter at hand and explain the title of this post! And that is... cutting a doorway from the ensuite into the bedroom. There's never been any question that this was going to be quite a tiny little bathroom. It's pretty hard to cram a shower, a toilet and a vanity into a space that has an area of only about three square metres.

But it's certainly possible! Just.

 

So, we finally decided that it was high time to allow this room to fulfill its ensuite destiny instead of languishing as an oversize cupboard. We pulled all of the junk out of there, relocated it all to the shed, and brought in a few props to help us plan out the space again.

I'd particularly like to draw your attention to our toilet stand-in. Yes, it's a Louis IV ghost chair with a piece of toilet seat sized cardboard (which I traced and cut from our real toilet seat) sitting on top. Never say we're not resourceful! I really needed this step of the process so that we could determine how far out from the wall the toilet would need to sit.

And that piece of information gave us the all-important ability to then mark on the wall where our new doorway to the master bedroom could start.

Here's the other side of that wall, from the master bedroom. It doesn't look very big with all of the furniture in there, but there's just enough space there for a little 720mm wide doorway.

So that I wouldn't have to spend the next few weeks of my life sleeping in and wearing a fine coating of sawdust, we decided that if we were going to cut through that wall, even if we were doing it from the ensuite side, we needed to try and create a bit of a dust barrier.

So, I dug through my bits and bobs and found these old double curtain rod brackets...

Which we then quickly screwed into the wall, popped a little spare pine board over the top to create a ledge, and then I stapled a drop sheet to the wall above. My little makeshift shelf then served the purpose of making the drop sheet sit out from the wall a bit (so it wouldn't make contact with the saw coming through the wall). I then stapled the dropsheet a couple of times down the sides as well, and voila! Instant dust barrier! A very effective one too, I might add.

So then we could get to the fun (but incredibly nerve-wracking) part... cutting through the wall! This isn't the first time in this renovation that we've cut a brand new doorway into a wall (see here), so technically we shouldn't have a problem with it, but it's the first time we've done it without Tom, who was yet again conveniently away with work. Daniel and I gritted our teeth, crossed our fingers (mentally, since it's hard to operate a circular saw with your fingers crossed), and plunged in.

With all of the sawdust flying around we even discovered that we had a working smoke alarm in that room! How useful!

Once we had cut as far as the circular saw would allow us to, Daniel pulled out the reciprocating saw and finished off the bottom ends of our cuts.

And then... the moment of truth...

A new doorway!!!

As always, destruction is the quickest part of this process! As it turned out, that dropsheet that we had strung up also came in handy to give me some form of privacy in the bedroom as well, since there was now a direct line of sight from the original doorway (from where I took the above photo) straight through to my bed.

Not for long, though! Here's a sneak peek of what came next...