Thinking Ahead - Converting our attic space

Although we haven’t long moved into the house, and we have no immediate plans to do any major renovation work we have still been dreaming of what we might do in the years to come. We love our little home and the area it is in so we hope we can stay put for a number of years, but when we finally start a family the space we have will be at a premium. It’s only a 2 bed house and currently the second bedroom is used as a crafting space and storage for all of our photography gear and newborn props.

Luckily we have a rather large attic space running the entire length of the house, which is just about tall enough to stand up in so the idea is to eventual turn this in to a workable storage/crafting space. The images above via Freshome.com are some great inspiration of what you can do with an attic, sadly mine isn’t quite as big as most of them, but the idea is the same!

We have already started boarding out the floor and the walls of the attic and have installed a sturdy pull down ladder to make access nice and easy. Even though there is a light it’s still pretty dark up there so the first major thing we would like to do is put in 1 or 2 skylights. They would help flood the space with some much needed natural light, and make the whole space feel like a room rather than just an attic.

Then of course there would be dressing the room and making it functional for our storage and my crafting needs. Our whole house is painted white with wood floors so that would probably be a starting point, although I would probably settle for just putting some big rugs down on the boards for the flooring, like the ones below from Ikea I’m not a fan of curtains so all our windows have blinds of some sort, rollers on the big windows in the living room and bedroom and venetian in the kitchen and bathroom. So seeing as the attic windows will be skylights I would probably go with VELUX blinds as they would be nice and easy to fit and they come in lots of colours.

Working out how to make the most out of the space storage wise will be Jon’s challenge but I have no doubt we will probably utilise some of the Ikea storage systems. We already use the ALGOT storage system for all the props in the spare bedroom and it works really well as its adjustable to fit your space and storage requirements, and I have my craft desk built in to it.Everything else would have to be worked out once we start pulling the room together properly, but this is a general idea of where we hope to do with the attic conversion at some point. I think the attic conversion into a workable storage space would be a great addition to the house and be a real asset to our storage problems.