Bedroom Suite Foyer – DONE! (Before and After)

Here is a look at the finished foyer. I really like how this area has developed. Since our bedroom is away from the music room, I really like that this foyer serves as a sort of buffer zone that provides some separation between the music room and our bedroom. You can see the bedroom from the music room, but you can’t see everything from the door. So there’s still a bit of mystery that draws people in.

And now that door that was once a paneled opening leading to a three-bedroom hallway with a guest bathroom is now the door leading to our master bedroom.

To understand how drastic the difference is here, we have to go back to 2013 and remember what this area looked like when we bought our home. The day we closed on the house, the paneled opening between the music room and the hallway looked like this. It was so narrow and had an accordion separation between the two areas.

Once entering this paneled opening, there were two very impressive cupboards on either side – a wardrobe on the left and another smaller cupboard (the original wardrobe) which housed the furnace intake duct.

And straight ahead were two bedroom doors.

And if you stood in front of the bedroom door and looked back in the other direction, towards what is now the music room, you had this view.

And then next to the large wardrobe was the door to the third bedroom.

Early on, I widened the paneled opening between the music room and the hallway to make it easier for Matt to maneuver through this opening.

After the first renovation, the hallway remained quite large. You can see that the wall to the left of the guest bathroom was long enough to accommodate a small console table.

And after I removed the large wardrobe, I installed these cupboards in the same place. Just to the right of the built-in cupboards you can see a section of the door to the guest bedroom.

Here’s a look at this closet from the other direction.

And then came the second iteration. This happened because we decided to convert the bedroom on the right into a large, wheelchair accessible master bathroom. The original hardwood floor in the photo below shows how far the wall was moved forward into the hallway.

Back then we went from three bedroom doors on the hallway to two bedroom doors on the hallway.

Here you can see how much space we lost in the hallway (which was totally fine since it was so big to begin with). After this wall was moved forward, there was no longer enough room to the left of the bathroom for a small console table. But since we locked one door, there was room for a larger console table against the wall where the bedroom door used to be.

That left us with the door to the left of the console table, which led to the room that I eventually turned into our home gym, and the door to the right of the built-in closet, which became our guest room (i.e., the bedroom we slept in for several years).

And then came our whole home gym flooring crisis, which required replacing the hardwood floor and subfloor. Since the work would be quite extensive, we decided to convert this entire area into our master bedroom. I started by removing the built-in closet from the hallway.

And then I decided to completely remove the door to our former home gym and our new bedroom. But originally I thought I would keep the door to the guest bedroom (which was going to become my walk-in closet and laundry room).

But then I decided to open that door too. At this point the entire area looked so completely different than it did at the beginning that it seemed like a completely different room.

And since this entire area was now going to be our master bedroom, I added French doors to the paneled opening between the music room and the foyer.

And this is what this area looks like now. (Please note that I completely forgot to clean the intake port. )

The guest bathroom eventually becomes a much-needed storage space for Matt’s equipment – wheelchair, shower wheelchair, Hoyer lift – as well as the new location for the water heater. This is an upcoming project.

And here’s the view from the other direction – from the bedroom looking back towards the music room.

Here’s the view from a little further back, where I’m actually standing in the bedroom.

This is the view straight ahead from the door of my walk-in closet.

I absolutely love this view. I just love this view from the music room into the bedroom.

These are the two openings that formerly served as two doors to the guest room on the left and the gym on the right.

I know it was a bit controversial for me not to put a door on the closet, but I love this view way too much to cover it up with a door.

And of course our chapel picture (from our wedding day) has a prominent place in the new bedroom suite.

So those are three areas of our master bedroom that are finished – my walk-in closet, the master bathroom, and the foyer. I just need to do a few smaller projects in the bedroom.

I hung this full length mirror on the wall to the left of the closet. Since I didn’t have room for a full-length mirror in the closet, it had to go into the foyer. This was actually a very convenient place to do it. And the bench in the foyer gives me the perfect spot when I need to sit down to put on my shoes. In a way, this foyer is not only the entrance to our bedroom, but also an extension of my walk-in closet.

Seeing the last picture really makes me want to redo the rest of the floors sooner rather than later. (Eventually all of our floors will be light and bright.) But I’m trying not to get ahead of myself. I need to finish the bedroom and immediately after that I need to finish the studio bathroom as this will be our new, temporary guest bathroom. And then when we have a working guest bathroom, I can come back and turn the original hallway bathroom into much-needed storage. So the floors will have to wait a bit, but I’m really hoping to get them all replaced this year.