Tile Room

AKA TV room, AKA guest quarters. The redeeming feature of this room in 1995 was it's size. If you take away this room and the upstairs suite, this is not a big house. Salem has many houses with very small, chopped up rooms, which is not the case here.
Being a late 60's addition, this is the only portion of the house that has a concrete slab floor. It also had nice beam ceilings which, thankfully, were above 8 ft high. It unfortunately also had a big dry bar area, cheap wood paneling and old carpet.

The fireplace mantel/facing was and remains dated (best euphemism I can find).

For a while it served as my shop (no pix in that configuration) as it was heated and nearer the areas I was working on than what is now my shop. The first thing that went was the carpet, then the bar area. I did keep part of it, which after removing the sorta brown stain, replacing the slat doors and making a countertop for it from walnut and oak, now serves as a a/v cabinet and base for the TV (which came about 12 years later).

In 1997, I used my vacation time to build the sunroom and make the major changes to this room with the help of my friend Rigoberto, my mom and that summer one of my aunts from Mexico.
The carpet was replaced with tile and the aluminum windows with vinyl. Lath & plaster replaced the paneling.

We partitioned off a corner of the room for a bath and storage area.
The built in cabinets in the bath provide flexibility when guests are here for extended intervals.

The cabinet above the sink used the area between the studs to achieve a shallow profile.

The DIY bookcase serves to break up the room a bit and provide a workarea together with the secretary desk.

As a divider the bookcase has room for books on both sides and also can serve as a standing work surface area.

I was lucky to have bought the stained glass door on the wall where the TV is located. A few years later, that style and vintage of door had become scarce.

The materials chosen were keeping with a mindset of: "time pit" is OK- hey, it's a hobby, but "money pit" is not. As time went by, I've come to regret not getting what I wanted in the first place, particularly with respect to windows, but at the time I needed to pick my battles. The TV is an obvious splurge, but as stated elsewhere, it was self-payment for the work we did on the house for 2008-2009. As a movie buff, it is a great treat to be able to see films in the dimensions and quality that today's technology allows. I tell Geri that in "the good old days", I knew all the movie revival houses in West LA and San Francisco and kept track of what was playing. I do miss the sense of community that the revival houses provide. However, there are no revival houses in Salem (although Salem Cinema is really pretty good at showing just about every worthwhile current release at their two locations), and Netflix sure is convenient and has an incredible selection.