So, I’m finally writing about our very first renovation project for our house that was completed a week ago. We didn’t really do much with this one, since we hired some guys to come do the work for us. We didn’t feel comfortable cutting through rafters ourselves, since we’ve never really done anything like that and, you know, rafters can kind of be important to holding a house up. So, I think its a good idea to call in professionals sometimes. The guys that did our work were fantastic, and I highly recommend them if you live in South Carolina. I think they do work from like Newberry to Florence, so they have a wide area they service. The guy’s name is Jamie Drake, and he works for Atkinson Home Improvement out of West Columbia. Seriously, we’re going to be using them in the future, and I’m about to show you why.

Here is what we had when we started. It is what it looks like…a hole in the ceiling in the bathroom.

This will give you an idea of the scale. The actual “access panel” (aka – hole) is only really big enough for a child or very small adult to fit through.

Now, for the attic pull down access, we wanted it installed in the hallway in between the bedrooms and the bathroom. This seemed the most logical place to have it. In our entire house, all of the doorways and windows have a consistent trim treatment. The board running along the top overhangs anywhere from a quarter inch to an inch over the trim boards running up vertically on each side. Its hard to explain, so here’s a picture.

Now, since this hallway has four doorways in it, all with this trim, we wanted the trim around the attic access to match. The guys did a great job with the, and managed to make it fit with the rest of the trim very well.

I didn’t take a photo of the hallways before, but really it was just the tongue and groove ceiling, like in the rest of the house, with a light fixture and a smoke alarm. Since there are smoke alarms in both bedrooms, we’re just moving the smoke alarm from the hall up into the attic, and the light fixture was a very basic, fairly new light fixture, so we just removed it and we’ll use the wiring in the attic for lights up there.

The overhang on the trim is pretty minimal, but I think it works, since the trim in the rest of the house varies from door to door on the amount of overhang, and since we used a smaller board for this trim. So, I think it works as far as proportion. You wouldn’t think it was installed in 1922, obviously, but I don’t think it feels too out of place.

We’re very excited about this, because if now allows us to stop using our bedroom as the attic, which will let me walk to my side of the bed instead of having to climb

Once we paint, I think it will look amazing. We’re waiting for it to get a little warmer before we paint, so it will likely be March before this project is totally done. Until then, though, its great to be able to get some stuff up there. I’ll post pictures of what the attic looks like once we get lighting up there.