Where would you lay your head?
At the very top of Moregeous Mansions sits the daddy dormer, looking out onto the new half of the house we’ve just re-built, i.e. from the window you can see in the picture above on the left. Our view in above is from the hallway door entrance. It’s a bit like a mezzanine room, where the bricks are front left will sit two steps to the upper level. Now we’ve extended into the loft space on the left and taken all the ceilings down, opening up the original roofline, this little room which was once my pokey attic office feels huge.
Originally I was going to have the bed on the upper level of this room, up the stairs but Mr M came up with the stonking idea of making a bed deck. The space is easily big enough as you can see above but we had a conundrum:
- Feet facing our view here, to allow two people to easily clamber/sit back onto a side of the bed each. This would mean heads in the eaves which wouldn’t give an ideal area to sit up but would give a more balanced view of the bed area visually and space to create shelving on either side, or
- Heads right and feet left, which would mean one person sleeping at the lowest section, no shelving to speak of (maybe a bulkhead bedhead?) and both climbing in from one side. But, it gives a higher area to sit up in.
Everyone on Twitter opted for No2, citing the Sit Up With Brew test as the clincher. I get it (even though I don’t drink brews) and did plump for this option, but a little part of me still liked the heads in the eaves idea with all its other pluses. The designer in me will need to come up with some clever solutions to compensate.
I’m please we’ve gone to all the effort we did with the sub-floor. Part of the lower section of this dormer room floats over our neighbours house, so weird, so we had to make super sure we were on top of both noise and fire issues. We’ve spent time clearing all the dirty lath and plaster sub-floors, sealing around party wall gaps with fire foam and thoroughly insulating for heat and sound proofing. I used a company called Vivalda in Manchester for my fire protection boards fixed above the neighbours hall, then finally an 18mm ply to create a good solid floor. When you’re doing your own work, you rarely cut corners, that’s generally why self builds take so long. This slender area to the right of the bed deck is about 3% of the overall work that we’ve still left to do, but it feels like an achievement all the same!
Next job is to source and sort sound boards for the rest of the dormer floor as it’s just chipboard on timber joists at the moment, which will be rubbish for sound travel into the hallway and our (eventual!!) bathroom below.
Mr M has been the Kingspan star, bashing in all the ceiling joist infills whilst I’ve been corporate job flouncin’. He did leave the pernickety bits to me, like fire foaming edges and getting into tight corners. Team work you see 😉
Feels like a long way since the whole roof was open and the snow was blowing in last year. We’re getting there!
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