History of the Headquarters: the Attic Master Bedroom Finish Conversion Project

It’s been a while since I wrote about a project here at the Headquarters, so I thought it would be a good time to finally (finally!) write about something I have teased in a few past articles: the Attic Master Bedroom Finish Conversion Project. The name is still in the development stage.

When we bought the Headquarters way back in 2015, we loved the beautiful oak staircase prominently displayed in the living room. The problem with the beautiful oak staircase prominently displayed in the living room was where they went, which was an open, unfinished, dirty pile of lumber, insulation, and mouse poop.
For the first few years, the beautiful prominently displayed oak staircase served very well as a multi-tiered display shelf for all of the things for which we didn’t yet have a home. Not ideal.
Eventually we realized that it was time for us to expand our “Expandable Cape” (according to the real estate listing) into a proper cape with a second floor.

The first thing we ran into was the ceiling height. At the peak it is around 6 feet 8 inches, and it slopes down on either side. With a footprint of about 20 feet wide, this did not provide a whole lot of room for my head to roam about. I can take three steps from my head touching the ceiling on one side to touching my head to the other side.
We mulled over our options, including creating dormers, lifting the entire roof level, or removing a few inches of shinbone from my legs. None of those options seemed terribly feasible on our budget of As Close To Nothing As Possible, so we went with the “Use What Is Available” method.
Another issue was the lack of any floor at all besides some loose boards strewn about, which meant we would have to start completely from scratch.
Yet another issue, and this one actually ended up being one of the more expensive to solve, was that the insulation was in the attic floor. As we were making the attic into a bedroom, and therefore wanted some of the heat from below to waft up and warm our toes, we had to find a way to move that insulation from the floor to the ceiling. As the ceiling was so low, we didn't want to make it any thicker to accommodate the extra insulation we would need to bring it up to code, so we had to look for solutions.

We ended up going with a closed-cell spray foam insulation that would give us an R-value of around 35. Our previous R-value had been in the neighborhood of 7, so this was a marked improvement. It came with a downside, though: a $6500 price tag. Ouch!
We hope that the added heat retention will amount to enough energy savings to eventually pay for itself, but that check still hurt to write.
We also decided that hauling a bunch of drywall up the stairs and attaching it to the sloped ceiling sounded like an absolutely awful job to do, especially since I am terrible at hanging drywall and previous Guest Expert Tom suggested I go jump in a lake when I asked him to do it. We hired some contractors to shoulder that burden, and $1500 got that mess done for us. Money well spent!
We then went on to some projects that I have covered in depth in earlier articles, such as turning one tiny window into two less tiny windows, building a subfloor, mudding and taping the drywall, and laying a floating floor.
Somewhere in the middle of all of that we also built a knee wall to square the room off a bit.

We have been up there for a little over a year now, and I’d love to tell you all about how beautifully finished it is, and how nicely the trim pulled everything together, and I will tell you those things just as soon as I have actually done them.
The window trim was done a month or so ago by Guest Expert Tom (who happens to be my Father-In-Law) when he could no longer stand to see it unfinished. The rest of the trim is still at the shop. By which I mean lumber yard, because I haven’t purchase it yet.
I also don’t have any lights up there yet besides some floor lamps, which makes coming to bed at night a little interesting. Like they say, if you want nice shoes, don’t marry a cobbler, and if you want anything in your house to work right ever, don’t marry a DIYer.
Rest assured there will be more coming when I finally get around to doing some of these last bits, but in the meantime, perhaps it may come as some solace to those of you out there who feel like every DIY project online is straight from the screens of HGTV except theirs that I, the man dubbed by home improvement experts around the world* as Captain DIY, have unfinished projects at home.
In the meantime, get out there and get creative with your house! Who knows, you might just find a space that you could make usable with a bit of touching up!