Bedroom Solutions

Since we moved, multiple visitors have walked in and exclaimed, "You actually have a dining room!!! It's not a BEDROOM!!!" It makes me laugh every time.

Yes, in our old house we had converted the dining room into, you guessed it, a bedroom. IMHO this was a stroke of genius even tho it was quite strange to some.

Still, I think it's worth sharing because our redo 1.) converted largely unused space into a much needed bedroom, 2.) cost us less than $2,000 which was a huge improvement over the 25K we were quoted to add on another bedroom, and yet 3.) was easy to convert back into a dining room for resell value.

Originally, we had the typical large livingroom/dining room combination. Since we didn't have a formal dining table, the dining room was largely unused. Soooo, we hired a contractor to come and put a wall (with French doors) between the living and dining areas.

When we originally did the conversion there wasn't a second set of French doors going outside--so imagine that is a window. This pic is from the livingroom looking into the diningroom/bedroom:


The doors were kept closed between the two rooms and covered with thick sheers on thin rods at the top and bottom of the glass panels. This pic is again from the livingroom:



In typical modern house style, there was also originally an open walk-through between the diningroom and the kitchen. In our bedroom conversion, we put in a swinging butler's door with a glass window on top which I had seen in a friend's fancy formal diningroom.

This is looking from the kitchen towards the diningroom/bedroom with the door open:



Closed here:


It worked great as another bedroom for various kids over the years, usually an older teen. The only downside was if they left their bedroom door open guests could see in (of course my teens always keep their bedrooms perfectly clean and of course I'm a perfectly good storyteller). The upside was they were close to the fridge!

It was a cheap solution to bedrooms and the best part was that in the end, we were able to quickly convert the room back into a formal dining room which looked quite beautiful with the double French doors and swinging butler's door.



Adopting again? Pregnant with your 19th child (let me guess, your last name is Duggar)? Maybe this solution will work for you! It served our family well for many years.