I don’t know how it is that I have so far neglected to mention the single largest project I am likely to undertake in this calendar year, but it’s finally drawing to a close, so I feel like giving you all an update.

In a nutshell: I tore my bedroom down to the plaster and subflooring, ripped out the drop ceiling, and rebuilt it all again.

Somebody, at some point, for reasons I can only guess at, decided that the bedrooms in my house were just too spacious, and would look a lot better if their ceilings were sixteen inches lower. Various other people, at other times, have applied their opinions about the desirability of thick texturing on the plaster. The most recent owner clearly believed that cheap beige carpet was a good thing. And nobody, in the entire history of this house’s existence, appears to have taken issue with the manifest insufficiency of this bedroom’s single, solitary power outlet.

I had one month – February – between the departure of one tenant and the arrival of another, in which to move all my possessions out, tear my bedroom apart, and rebuild it in a manner more in keeping with my aesthetic priorities. I just barely accomplished this, but of course the last 10% of any project takes the other 90% of the time and so I have been living in a mostly-but-not-quite finished bedroom all month.

The ceiling is back up to its original height, and after scraping off years of texture and wallpaper, I smoothed the walls back up with a fresh coat of finishing plaster. The carpet is gone, with a new layer of sound-dampening felt under a sturdy sheet of engineered hardwood in its place. I’ve installed new door, closet, and window trim, and now the baseboards as well. Yesterday I finished painting all this new trim, and it’s starting to look almost respectable in here.

I’ve slimmed down my furniture as well, passing a couple of shelving units along to new owners after making better use of the vertical space in my closet – so there’s more open space horizontally and not just vertically.

There’s still a fair bit of work left but I am definitely easing down the home stretch. The ceiling needs crown moulding, I have a ceiling fan/light unit to install in place of the bare bulb currently illuminating the room, and my wall-mounted nightstands need to be reinstalled after I’ve finished painting the wall they live on. I should probably come up with a new closet door, too.

It’s been a ton of work, but I’m really happy with the way it’s coming together. It’s my bedroom, in my house; I’ve never had so much freedom to customize a space before, and it’s been great to take things as far as I wanted to make them go.