Before tour: the east bedroom

The Ordinary House has three bedrooms, all upstairs.  Two of them are in the original, 1750s portion of the house.  Since the house was a tavern at one time, I presume that these rooms once served as guest quarters for overnight patrons.  If only those walls could talk…

Both of the small bedrooms are long and skinny by present-day standards at about 9′-6″ wide and over 19′ long. It’s not a room proportion I’d ever draw for a client, but it’s actually quite cozy, in a good way:

The room has original heart pine floors and ceiling boards.  The walls have been covered with some cheap-o paneling that I’ll pull down sooner or later.  The door appears to be original and has a nice cast iron rim latch with porcelain knobs.  There are three double-hung windows with nine-over-six sashes and wavy glass panes.  As you’d expect, the east bedroom gets great light in the morning.

Our master suite is large and has lots of potential, but I admit to being jealous of the fireplace that shows up in each of the smaller bedrooms:

Note the radiator piping that continues across the firebox opening, camouflaged with a bit of trim paint where it runs in front of the mantel.  Maybe the boiler installer thought this would be a convenient way to boost the output of the radiators on particularly cold mornings? The mantel in the east bedroom is very different than the ones in the rest of the house, so I suspect that it may have migrated here from another home during a past renovation.

At some point, a closet was added to the end of the room.

The choice of sliding doors is unfortunate, and will be remedied by the business end of my sledgehammer. The bedroom renovations will be fairly low impact and will mostly be about freshening up finishes. For now, we use the east bedroom as our guest room. Someday, it’ll be nice for a rugrat.  And until then, we’ll fill the void with gratuitous cute puppy photos.

For example, Louis enjoys our new central heat (there’s a register right behind him):