Spare bedroom: office and dressing room swap and renovation

When we first moved into our 1911 Colorado Springs Craftsman, we used one of the upstairs bedrooms as a dressing room. I have a glamour photography business and like having a dedicated room for the girls to get dressed and their hair and makeup done. But since we were going to sell the house we wanted to have a more mainstream floor plan and that meant using the bedroom we used for a dressing room to be an office instead. Luckily there was a small covered porch off the bedroom that would work perfectly as a little dressing room.

The smallest bedroom was pretty cute as a dressing room.

But when I didn't have any photo shoots, it became a messy place for random items.

So we took everything out, patched, painted, stripped the hardware, and changed the outlet covers from off white to white.

We used Benjamin Moore Old Prairie for the walls and Benjamin Moore Cotton Balls on the trim.

Lots of houses in Colorado Springs have small covered porches off the largest bedroom. They were for TB patients who came to Colorado Springs seeking “the cure” which consisted of, among other things, lots of fresh air. Some of the porches were open at first and covered later. Some were always covered but with lots of windows, which we think was the case with ours.

The small covered porch off the bedroom would make a nice dressing room.

The small covered porch needed a lot of work before it could be used as a dressing room.

We nicknamed this the "door to nowhere" and had some trouble getting financing because of it. It originally went out to an uncovered porch- our neighbor's is still intact. Some drywall solved the problem.

It was also really cold in there in the winter, so we did our best to close up all the gaps and holes. Mike got to use his favorite thing, spray foam, for this task.

This was the only light in the room, and it had no electrical outlets, so we got an adapter for the fixture that had a couple of outlets on it. You have to have the light turned on to use the outlets, but since I only really needed the outlet for a hair dryer, it wasn’t that big of a deal.

It took days to prep, prime, patch, paint and caulk this room.

I loved the original red floor, but it needed to be repainted and we didn't want to spend any more money, so we just did it in the white (Benjamin Moore Cotton Balls). I was planning to use a rug anyway, which covered most of the floor.

I cut up the pink curtains from the other room and used them in here.