How to Create an Extra Bedroom Without Building an Extension
Need Another Bedroom? You May Already Have the Space An extra bedroom can solve a lot of problems. Maybe the kids are getting older and need their own rooms. Perhaps you regularly have family or friends staying over. You might be working from home but still need somewhere for overnight guests.
Or perhaps you’ve looked at the cost and disruption of building an extension and decided there has to be another way. The good news is that there often is. Before adding another room to your home, it’s worth looking carefully at the space you already have.
With some clever planning, room dividers, wall beds and better storage can help create an extra bedroom without building an extension. In some homes, the extra bedroom is effectively already there. It just needs to be unlocked.
1. Divide a Large Room Into Two
Take a look around your home. Do you have a large living room, rumpus room, dining area or open-plan space that could potentially do two jobs? If you do, a room divider can be one of the simplest ways to create a separate room without constructing a permanent wall.
Modern room dividers are very different from the folding screens many people imagine. A properly fitted sliding or pivot room divider can run from floor to ceiling, creating a genuine physical separation between two areas. Close the divider and you’ve created two spaces. Open it and you can have your large room back again.
This can work particularly well where you only need the additional bedroom occasionally. For example, part of a large living area could become a private guest room when family visits. Once they’ve gone home, open the room dividers and the full living space is available again. That’s something a permanent plaster wall can’t do.
2. Turn Your Home Office Into a Guest Bedroom
This is becoming one of the most practical uses for a wall bed. A home office might be used five days a week, while a guest bedroom could sit empty for months.
Why dedicate two rooms to those jobs if one room can comfortably do both?
A wall bed allows a proper mattress and bed to be stored vertically against the wall when it isn’t required. During the day, the majority of the floor remains available. Some wall bed configurations can even incorporate a fold-down desk, creating a genuine home office and guest bedroom in the same space. When someone comes to stay, the desk folds away and the bed comes down.
When your guest leaves, the bed goes back against the wall and you’ve got your office again. For homes where every room counts, that’s an enormous improvement over keeping a conventional bed permanently sitting in the middle of a spare room.
3. Create a Bedroom Within an Open-Plan Area
Open-plan homes give us lots of space, but sometimes not enough rooms. A large open-plan living, dining and kitchen area might look fantastic, but there can be opportunities to make part of that space more flexible. A strategically positioned room divider can allow one section to be closed off when required.
The trick is to think about how the room needs to function both open and closed. Where will the bed go? Is there sufficient natural light and ventilation? Can people still move comfortably through the rest of the home when the divider is closed? Does the space need additional storage? These questions matter.
The objective isn’t simply to squeeze a bed behind a divider. It’s to create a useful room that still allows the rest of the home to work properly.
4. Use a Wall Bed Instead of a Permanent Bed
Sometimes the problem isn’t finding another room. It’s the bed itself. A queen-size bed takes up a considerable amount of floor area. Put one into a modest room and suddenly there’s very little space left for anything else. Yet if it’s a guest bed, it might only be slept in a handful of times each year.
A wall bed solves that problem by only occupying the floor when somebody is actually using it. When closed, the bed sits vertically within its cabinet. When needed, it pulls down into the room.
Importantly, this doesn’t have to mean sleeping on a thin folding mattress or uncomfortable sofa bed. A properly designed wall bed uses a conventional mattress and can provide a comfortable long-term sleeping solution.
That makes wall beds useful for more than occasional visitors. They can also be considered where a room needs to regularly alternate between a bedroom and another purpose.
5. Combine a Wall Bed and Room Divider
This is where things get particularly interesting. You don’t necessarily have to choose between a wall bed and a room divider. Using both can allow you to create a bedroom that almost completely disappears when it isn’t needed. Imagine a large living or entertainment area.
A wall bed is installed against one wall, while a sliding room divider allows that section of the room to be separated from the main living area. Most of the time, the wall bed is closed and the room divider is open. You have one large space. When guests arrive, close the divider and lower the bed.
You’ve created a separate sleeping area without adding another room to the house. When the guests leave, everything opens up again. For the right home, that’s a very efficient use of space.
6. Don’t Forget About Wardrobe Storage
Creating somewhere to put a bed is only part of creating a useful bedroom. People need somewhere to put their things. But that doesn’t necessarily mean installing a huge built-in wardrobe. For an occasional guest room, a relatively compact wardrobe with some hanging space, shelving and drawers may be plenty.
Custom wardrobe systems are particularly useful here because the storage can be designed around the space that’s actually available. A narrow section beside a wall bed, an unused corner or a shallow wall may provide enough room for practical storage without taking over the new bedroom.
The objective should be to use the available space efficiently rather than automatically installing the largest wardrobe possible.
7. Think About Privacy – Not Just Walls
If you’re creating an extra bedroom from an existing living area, privacy becomes important.
A solid room divider will naturally provide more visual privacy, while translucent panels can allow light to pass between rooms while obscuring the view. Sound is another consideration. Room dividers can help reduce sound transfer between spaces, but they shouldn’t automatically be treated as soundproof walls.
If acoustic privacy is particularly important, that needs to be considered when planning the room and choosing the dividing system. For an occasional guest bedroom, however, a well-designed room divider can provide a very practical balance between privacy and flexibility.
How Much Could You Save Compared With Extending?
Building an extension is a major project. Depending on what you’re adding, there may be design work, permits, engineering, foundations, roofing, electrical work, plastering, flooring, painting and potentially plumbing involved. It also takes time.
That’s not to say extensions don’t make sense. If you genuinely need more floor area, extending may be exactly the right decision. But spending a substantial amount of money adding another room doesn’t make much sense if your existing home already contains enough space – it’s simply being used inefficiently. That’s the question worth asking first.
Do we actually need a bigger house, or do we need to make better use of the house we’ve already got? The answer can save you a considerable amount of money.
Look at How Often Your Rooms Are Actually Used
Here’s a useful exercise. Walk through your home and think about how often each room is genuinely being used. You may discover that your dining room gets used twice a month.
The guest bedroom might be occupied ten nights a year. A large rumpus room could sit virtually empty most weekdays. Your home office may be empty every evening and weekend. Meanwhile, you’re considering spending money to add another room.
That’s the contradiction that flexible room design can solve. Instead of having one room for one purpose, wall beds, room dividers and intelligent storage allow the same floor area to perform several different jobs.
Make the House You Have Work Harder
Creating an extra bedroom doesn’t always require bricks, concrete and months of building work. Sometimes the smarter answer is sitting inside the house already. A large room can be divided. A home office can become a bedroom at night. A guest bed can disappear against the wall when nobody is using it. And custom wardrobe storage can fit into spaces that might otherwise be wasted.
The important thing is to start with the problem rather than the product. Where could an extra bedroom realistically fit within your existing home?
Once you’ve identified that space, you can start looking at the combination of room dividers, wall beds and storage that will make it work.
At Indeco, we’ve spent years helping Australian homeowners make better use of the space they already have.
If you’re thinking about creating an extra bedroom without building an extension, it may be worth looking at your existing floor plan before calling the builder. You might already have all the space you need.
