Most people love large rooms, but sometimes too much undivided floor space is, well, too much of a good thing. In the Scottsdale, Arizona, bedroom featured in this Trading Spaces episode, Doug was faced with the task of making a "stadium-size bedroom" into a more intimate setting. While this master bedroom was, in fact, well short of stadium dimensions, it was a popular spot for the boys to play some football.

Large cabinet units, modest bookshelves, and simple freestanding panels have all been used to isolate parts of a room to provide privacy and enclosure. Doug decided to take a more ambitious route by building a large, freestanding wall set right in the middle of the room. Constructing such a wall is a simple project that can have a profound effect on a room. In this particular room, the wall created a visual barrier between the door and the bed and helped to define a completely new sitting and reading area in the room that was made possible by stealing a couch from another part of the house and adding some new floor lamps. In short, the parents were able to reclaim their own bedroom, and the kids had to take their football games elsewhere.

This kind of project is only possible in a large room. The dimensions of the bedroom in this episode appear to be about 24 feet by 14 feet, with approximately 8-foot-high ceilings. With a room this large, you can place a new wall that is about 8-feet wide in the in the center of the room, dividing it into sections that measure about 12 feet by 14 feet, and still leave 3-foot-wide pathways on either side of the wall. The new wall is only about 6 1/2-feet high, leaving an open space at the top that allows light and air to circulate and helps maintain the sense of a larger single room with a divider, and not of two smaller, fully enclosed rooms.

The wall is completely freestanding, meaning that it is not fastened to the floor or ceiling. This is possible because of the H-shape design (as seen from above), with the long horizontal component of the H being supported by two 4-foot long perpendicular walls. This freestanding feature simplifies both the initial construction and the future removal, should you decide later to revert to the larger open space.