Some recent clients of mine had just bought a new home in Inglewood AND had a baby.  It was time to get the house ready for kiddos!  They asked me to add a wall upstairs to close in a room to make it another bedroom for their growing family.

Adding a new wall, even in this case, is generally straight-forward.   It’s not as complicated as removing a wall and patching things up.  The trick for this project was to match the materials and try to make it look like this wall has always been there.

The biggest part of matching the new wall to the old is the trim work and the bedroom doors.  The walls of the rooms are all painted knotty-pine tongue-and-groove boards with trim along the top corners as well as the lovely old-fashioned casings.  It looks nice, but it will take some work to keep this look.  The plan was to move all the knotty-pine to the bedroom walls from the stairwell and then drywall the stairwell.  I started by carefully removing all the trim and putting it aside until later.  Then it was time to build the wall that was supposed to be a mirrored image of the other.

After framing the wall and running some new electrical to add a light switch and some outlets I started re-installing the pine boards and trim.  I made a trip to Hailey’s Salvage on Dickerson Road and came up with two matching two-panel doors that I could install as new bedroom doors.  They had previously been sliding closet doors, which was nice because they didn’t have many old holes to deal with and they were in really good shape.

The glass door knobs are nice because they match all the other old knobs in the house, but they don’t have the huge mortise lockset that can be a real pain to install in a new door.  These were around $15 each at Home Depot.  (BTW-  they aren’t with the other locksets at HD, look in the section where they sell the gate hardware and hinges.)

The casings also took some extra time to recreate.  Using the existing doorway as a template, I made matching pieces from basic boards and routed down the edges, etc, to get it to look old.  It’s more expensive to do it this way, but it’s so much nicer than installing some stock casing that will look out of place.

You can tell it still needs to be painted, but I was very pleased with how it turned out.