Second Time Around

With the Lair finished, it was time to do something I've been wanting to do for years . . . . rip everything our of the Bellerose house and start it again from scratch.  Most of you won't be familiar with this house in it's first incarnation, it was the very first house I worked on on this blog and it was horrid.  It was one of those houses that just would not cooperate and I hated it from about five minutes after I first started it.  Now after years of ignoring it I'm finally going to turn it into something fabulous (I hope!).

This is the house with all everything stripped out of it (and a few test pieces of furniture moved back in).  As you can see it's basically five big empty boxes and was made using two cheap shelf units side by side.  As part of the renovation, I'll add a sixth room where you can see the bath in this photo.

The original house was Victorian, the new house will be late Victorian/Edwardian with a jumble of influences from between 1890 to 1910.  The ground floor will hold the dining room combined with the entry hall and the kitchen.  Technically, you would have been unlikely to walk right into a dining room through the front door of an Edwardian house, but in this case it's a better use of the available space.  This is going to be a back to front house, so the front door of the house will be on the back wall.  It'll just be a fake door, not an opening one. The back of the room will be raised above the level of the dining room floor by a platform.  Some fancy fretwork railing will separate the two levels of the room and help define the two spaces (entry/dining).

Next door will be the kitchen, right where it used to be.  Most of the furniture from the original kitchen will be reused in here (oven, table, sink and hutch) but rearranged to make better use of the space and allow for an expanded scullery area.  Like the dining room the back of the room will be raised up a couple of steps to define the areas of kitchen and scullery.

The middle floor will house the sitting room and what I'm currently calling the Rec room (as in recreation room).  The Sitting room will reuse the original gothic style sofa and chairs and the gothic theme in here will be enhnced with the addition of some of Sue Cook's plasterware and some William Morris style wallpaper.  Style wise this room will probably be a bit behind the times of the rest of the house, but hopefully it will good good enough you will be able to forgive the residents for not keeping it more up to date.  The Rec room will have a combination of uses, part study/office, part games room (including pool table) and part artist's studio.  Basically it's a place to spend your leisure time whether you like to read, paint or play games.

The top floor will be for bedrooms and bathroom.  The main bedroom will have a chinoserie theme (using up the paper I bought last year for Preston House but decided not to use).  Next door to this will be the bathroom which may be one large room or I may divide into two to create a bathroom and a second small bedroom.

So, here's hoping that this house will be better the second time around.