Phase 1 Reveal: Project Planning

I know you've been waiting with bated breath to learn about my secret summer project that I previewed in my last blog post. Between my Memorial Day weekend trip to Lake Blue Ridge with my family, another trip to Chicago to visit more family and attend a friend's wedding (which was gorgeous, btw), and the usual pull of my day job, there hasn't been a lot of time in the last couple weeks for blogging. But now the wait is over!

Meet the beginnings of my summer* project: THE BUNK ROOM! (*Calling this my "summer project" is a slight misnomer, as I actually started this project when we first moved into our house last summer, and I've been slowly and intermittently plugging away at it ever since. But for now, I'm calling it my "summer project" to motivate myself to finish it this summer.)

When I was a kid, I always wanted bunk beds, and as an adult, I've never given up on that wish. For the last several years, I've been ogling bunk rooms on Pinterest and dreaming of someday having a space where I could build my own bunk room. About a year ago, my husband and I moved to the Atlanta suburbs (OTP, for my Atlanta-based readers) and this room above the garage immediately jumped out to me as the perfect space to build the bunk room of my dreams.

During my first visits to the house (before we even bought it), I had my measuring tape out, already planning the specs for my new bunk room. The bedroom portion of the space is roughly 15.5' wide by 16.5' long, and it is immediately adjacent to an ante-room that will eventually be great for a couple couches and comfy chairs, and possibly some shelving for guests' suitcases. The walls on either side of the entry into the bunk area are each 56" -- a detail that particularly excited me because full size beds are 54" inches wide, meaning that I could fit two sets of full size bunk beds on either side of the room (8 beds in total). In my mind's eye, the larger bed width would help to accommodate the steep slope of the ceilings above the top bunks.

The length of the room was also exciting to me, as it was perfect to allow for a narrow shelf at the head of each bed and a roughly 2' mini-staircase between the beds on either side of the room. From the beginning, I felt that the relative size of the beds to the dimensions of the room would make it appear that the beds were original to the space -- something I'm finding to be true the further along I get on this project.

After we got the house under contract, I began obsessively drawing out my amateur bunk room plans on my iPad trying to figure out the details like the height of the top bunks, how I would structure and frame the beds to best accommodate my desired dimensions, where to place the shelf area above each bed, what shape the shelf area should be, and where to place a light above each bed (if I could ever figure out how to do lighting). I'll dive into each of these topics in separate posts because each deserves its own consideration (and I spent a lot of time thinking about each of these aspects).

Overall, I found the planning process to be so much fun - the excitement of buying our first house was absolutely intensified by my excitement about this bunk room. Below are some of my drawings

from that fun period. Again, my drawings are far from professional. No judgment! I wasn't using any special design software, just my iPad and some digital graph paper. I didn't know the exact slope of the ceiling at that point, so I played around with various slopes to create alternative plans. These are the only written plans I ever made. Everything else was in my head.

Stay tuned as I share more about each phase of my bunk room build out! Next step: demo and framing!