Following on my post about hating manufactured homes, here is the final outcome. Everything started about 6 months ago with wanting to retrofit one of the spare bedrooms in my house. I live in a 3-bedroom house all by myself, so the extra 2 bedrooms are, well, extra. One I have setup as a spare bedroom for guests – not that I really have any – and the other I setup as kind of a, umm, to be honest I’m not sure what to call it. I use it for storing many of my books (I’ve always had an interest in dragons and many of the books I have been buying the past few years have been dragon themed). I use it as a place to practice playing piano, or more specifically keyboard. I also use it as my display room to show the various trinkets I have purchased over the past few years, also nearly all dragon-themed.

So this room has officially become my “dragon room” since nearly everything in there follows a dragon theme; books, pictures, figurines, etc. It was a very pretty room before. And I don’t mean that in a good way. It didn’t fit the theme of dragons.

Not that all dragon-themed stuff has to be dark and gothic, but it was just too pretty and flowery. There were some other things that I didn’t like about the room. The light switch was wired to a plug on the wall so the ceiling fan had to be strung across the ceiling and down the wall to get it to work. The fan they ran actual in-wall electricity too, but not the light switch.

What is with that? I didn’t like how much space the closet took up. It wasn’t a big room to begin with and if it was going to be more of an office than a bedroom it really wouldn’t need a closet – and if I ever change my mind I can go buy a stand-up closet at Ikea.

So, with that in mind I decided to remodel the room. Since I was going to be doing that I (poorly) decided to replace all the windows in my house with new double-pane windows. As I said, that was a bad idea to try and do both projects at the same time; which is why it is now 6 months later and I am just now finishing everything. Because of how poorly designed the house was, and my own stupidity at times, I had to not only replace the windows but rebuild the window sills and trim around all the windows as well. As I said, some of that was my own stupidity and not the houses fault, but I will blame the house anyway.

I gutted the room. And I do mean gutted. I stripped the walls down to the studs. Stripped the floor down to the, well, floor. Scraped the ceiling of all the popcorn so I could cut a strip out for new wiring and retexture later. I ripped out the closet, the door frame, carpet, everything. They say tearing stuff out is easier than putting stuff back in. Not true with a mobile home. It takes much longer to rip out all those stupid staples and scrape all the glue off the studs to get things back to a point where you can actually work with them.

And thus I began to install new stuff in the room. New electrical wiring and plugs. New ethernet wiring and plugs (every house needs ethernet).

New texture on walls and ceiling. New laminate wood flooring. New door frame. New baseboards, door trim and window trim. All in all it was an enjoyable experience. Sometimes frustrating. Sometimes smack-my-forhead-and-say-doh at my own stupidity and then redo what I just did. Sometimes joyful to look at my accomplishment and be satisfied.

In the end I was left with a completely transformed room. A room that fit better with dragons. I will admit the wall color didn’t come out like I had hoped. It was supposed to be more of a silver color but once I put it on the wall it turned out to be closer to a blue. Oh well. I can live with that. It actually fits pretty decently with the darker-colored wood stuffs in the room. The room is now complete in terms of the construction. I still have some wall-ledges to put up and a few pictures to hang, but those are things that I am going to take time with so I don’t fill my brand new walls with holes while I move things around until I find a good place for everything to sit. I also might replace the ceiling fan/light with something else later. It is frankly too dim. It doesn’t provide enough light and would like a darker set of fan-blades instead of the bright-white ones it currently has.

Here is a final panorama of the room.