Making a Pax Room in the Living Room

Hello Everybody!

I am very excited to share with this community and everybody what I have done in my little apartment in hopes to help others who may have the same problem that I had.

Before I get started, a brief introduction about myself… I am a young father (32) of 2 lovely kids (4 and 1 years old) and hopefully, if everything goes well, the third one will be born in less than 8 weeks. I am married to an incredible woman who left everything to dedicate her entire time to our kids… we are from Spain but in 2011 we moved to Miami, which is where we live right now. We bought a small apartment in an incredible and beautiful island almost 3 years ago and here is where all our struggle started…

The apartment has 1 bedroom, 1 entire bathroom and another “half” bathroom. The total size of the apartment is 940 sq ft, which is more than enough for us considering the space we were used to live back in Spain, where at minimun, you find always 2 bedrooms in a similar sized apartment. It is even very common to see 3 bedrooms… Our living room is huge (for us) so we always thought there should be more than enough space to build a second room within the living room.

And we did, but we did it wrong, without permits and although I tried to do it right “half way” (I told the president of our condominium my plans and she sort of gave me “go ahead” telling me that she was going to keep it “secret”). We spent $3,000 to built a partition wall (we hired professional to do it…) but 6 months later, during the 6th month of pregnancy of my wife, we received a very tough letter from the lawyers giving us 30 days to demolish the wall and get back to the original lay out. We tried to dialogue with the board and find some amicable solution but the only solution accepted was the entire demolition. I did it, and I learned the lesson. Do it right, from the beginning…

So that is the story behind my motivation to build the “Pax Room”, a room within the living room made entirely with Ikea Pax closets, without any construction material other than furniture, so the division is made entirely with movable ikea PAX closets which is by no means attached permanently to any where. It is floating, it doesn’t touch the ceiling and it can be easily disassembled with zero damage to the apartment, in a few hours, maybe a day.

I want to share this with everybody. I am building a full detail website called “thepaxroom” to explain all the details of every step, every problem that I faced and to give all the tips that I can think of.

Hopefully, you like the “pax room” and get inspired to do something similar if it fits your needs…

Enjoy the pictures!

Original Lay Out and Living room when we bought it…