the allen's: The Infamous Upstairs

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away…well, maybe not so far away… The Tool Man and I decided to build a house.
“Let’s have an upstairs,” we said. “ Two great big rooms, for our baby monkeys to run around in.”
So, we built a house, and we allotted for two nice bedrooms upstairs. But since we only had one monkey at the time, we opted not to complete the upstairs. At least not yet.
Well, Monkey #2 arrived and she needed a place to live. So work began upstairs again. With a full nine months to prepare for her arrival, we were sure that bedrooms would be completed in time.
Ha.
Ha ha ha ha ha!
Monkey #2 will be 18 months old next week and guess what. She’s still got a tent pitched in the corner of my bedroom.
But do not despair. We’re closer to completion than we’ve ever been before.
With the trim work finally complete, the Tool Man and I spent my birthday cleaning up the space. We toted boxes and boxes and boxes of tools and scraps and trash downstairs. Then we swept up the whole place. That’s the worst part - sweeping up sheetrock powder and saw dust. That stuff gets everywhere. On your clothes, in your hair, up your nose! And it drifts downstairs to the rest of the house and coats everything a in fine white powder. Maybe we didn’t get any snow outside this weekend, but it looks like I got a half inch on my dining room table.

And of course the dust sticks to the bottom of your shoes, so every time you walk back downstairs, you leave white tracks across the floor. Just look at the stairs!

Remember a long, long time ago when I promised to show you some pictures of the upstairs? Well, today is your lucky day.
The basic layout is this. A bedroom on each side with a bathroom in the middle connecting the two rooms. The rooms are mirror images of each other, and each has it’s own vanity area.
I had originally intended on this room to be Ty’s, but I’m seriously thinking about switching things up and giving this one to Lucy instead. The rooms are basically identical, but this one has a large closet, and we all know that girls come with more clothes than boys!

This next picture is the back side of the same room. Each bedroom has two dormers. I just love all the neat angles in these rooms. They add so much architectural interest.
I plan on adding some free-standing shelves or cabinet under the sloped ceiling in the right of this picture so the monkey’s will have a place to store their towels and other bathroom essentials.

This is the part of the bathroom that the rooms share. The shower/bathtub is directly behind me in this picture. This is where the “throne” will be!

Here’s the vanity in the other bedroom. You can see the tub through the door.

I had these awesome built-ins custom made. They are huge! I’ll be able to hide all sorts of toy clutter in there. There are two of these in each room, one with doors and one with just shelves. I hope to find some cute baskets or boxes to contain the clutter on the shelves.

This “little” cabinet came from my mom’s dress shop. It was in the building when my grandmother, Nick Nick, bought the store some 40 years ago. They used to keep the lingerie in these drawers. The sizing labels are still on the drawer fronts. I just love pieces that have a history, especially when it’s a part of your history. My grandmother used to hide the money bag in here every night under the panties! How funny is that? Which drawer was it? I’ll never tell.