Princess Desk and Room

This princess room clearly needed a desk space for the little student. As with the rest of the room, the built-ins and the knee walls with doors to our storage cubbies meant that there wasn't a lot of space to work with, so D decided that this built-in should come out and a custom desk would go in. 

Demolition was surprisingly easy, so we didn't get any pictures of it. Just about everything could be pulled by hand or with a pry bar. There were spots that made us go "huh" though, as with any old house. We learned that the trim on the outside of the built-in was higher than the trim on the inside, which wasn't noticeable until we removed the vertical framing. D trimmed a piece from the front of the built-in to fit and inserted it, plus fitted a piece of wood trim. The floor also had missing pieces, and you can see from this picture that he added a small rectangle to fill in where the vertical front pieces of the built-in had been set into the floor:

We found a deeply discounted desk pedestal from Ballard Designs and then created a ledge to the height of that pedestal by screwing some pine boards around the perimeter into the studs. 

The most challenging (well, scary) part of the whole process was measuring over and over and then cutting the $99 "Floor and Decor" butcher block countertop to the right width. Then ripping it (shearing off a thin slice/plane) as it was a bit too deep for desk usage. The Bosch track saw made it a fairly easy process to make it thinner. Then D eye-balled a few different roundover bits we owned and ran a hand-held router across the front and side edge to give a nice rounded effect. He finished with Danish oil. He started with a very old can which was a huge mistake as it just went on sticky. And stayed sticky. So he had to run some mineral spirits across the board to de-sticky it. Then finish it again with a new(er) can. Still took several very smelly days in the basement (as it was winter there was no hope of using the outside or garage to cure) to get the smell in a sort of OK state--enough to put in a bedroom. For a while, we could smell it (from the basement) in most of the main floor of the house:

The middle hole in the floor was especially challenging to fill in because it got wider as you went deeper. I guess the contractor wanted some wiggle room when they installed the original bench / shelves. It was far too thin at the edges to keep as is, so D took a chisel and carefully widened the hole until the existing wood felt sturdy enough. Then he used some leftover oak flooring from our primary suite addition and cut it to friction-fit into the spot. The finish of course does not match, but no one is likely to notice until the next homeowner or future us rips out the desk.

And here it is, in all its glory. There's a charging station (I think my kids have more devices than I do) and lots of space to work (at least when she puts her junk away).

Without further ado, the rest of the room. You'll recognize the dressers and the bed, now with optional canopy attachment, from the guest room. Moving it up here is what allowed us to empty that room out and put in a Murphy bed instead. (The kids both knew it was now-or-never on this bedroom set--either one of them was taking it or it was going to be sold off.) This was my canopy bed and furniture set from the 1980s and apparently the multitudes of unicorn and Strawberry Shortcake canopies of my era just do not exist anymore. (I think they can be a health hazard because of how dusty they can get--so I try to shake this one off and dust the frame when I change the sheets.) This was one of very few I could find on Amazon, but fortunately, the room recipient loves it.

And of course we added another special touch to make the room even more magical:

And so as we enter 2026, I think I have finally caught up with all the bedroom upgrades that we made as a result of the new addition (guest room and both kid rooms). This all took place primarily in the last few hectic months of 2024, so you can see why we were too busy "doing" to be "writing."