Progress - Bedroom 2

March 2014

Like many other rooms in the house, Bedroom 2  received its suspended ceiling hangers in March .

April 2014

With all the Bedroom entry doors opening off the Foyer, care had to be taken in the arrangement of the beds and the door openings to ensure privacy in each of the rooms. One design principle was to ensure that the beds in each room did not back onto the same dividing walls, to minimise the effect of noise transmission between rooms. Secondly, it was important to ensure that lines of sight between rooms, when doors were open, were restricted. For example, when the doors to Bedrooms 2 and 4 and Ensuite 4 were all open, it would have been possible to directly see from the shower in Ensuite 4 onto the bed in Bedroom 2 (and vice versa). This was eliminated by building a short Privacy Wall in Bedroom 4, behind which the bed would be located. While it is possible to see from Bedroom 1 to Bedroom 4 when both doors are open, the only visible items in each room will be the desks (not quite as important as shielding the beds from each room).

July 2014

Once the plasterwork had been finished and a first coat of paint applied, the light streaming through the new windows makes Bedroom 2 quite light and airy. While there is still a fair bit of traffic on Rue Gambetta, the double-glazed windows cut down the noise significantly.

While the wall-doubling was mostly done on external walls, in Bedroom 2 the wall backing onto Ensuite 2 was also replastered due to a significant cosmetic crack in the rendering on the old brick wall, which could not easily be repaired. One of the tricks that the plasterers used to speed up the job was a set of walking stilts that they used to easily reach the high ceilings and the higher parts of the walls. This removed the need to erect and then move scaffolding as they worked around the room. The old floorboards in Bedroom 2 were sanded and stained and have come up with a beautiful warm finish. While they still creak a bit (luckily there are no bedrooms below), they look great.

August 2014

With all the walls and ceilings now having received their first coat of paint, the room is bright and airy, and the function of the privacy wall becomes apparent.