Illegal Bedroom

[reldum]

My question involves landlord-tenant law in the State of: Virginia

What is an "illegal bedroom"? The house that I was living in had one room walled off to create a make-shift bedroom that did not have a built-in closet. Instead an Ikea wardrobe that held about three shirts was provided. Is this legal?

The creation of this "bedroom" turned a 4 bedroom house into a five bedroom house.

[SChinFChin]

Normally, a house, or apartments in a building or condo has a floor plan, with a "certificate of occupancy" granted based on the plans. If the plans and the "C/O" has four bedrooms in it, then, it is a 4 BR house. The question is what do you call the extra room.

My experience is you can call it what you want. If the room is too small, the closet in it is too small, then for all intensive purposes, it's a "storeroom", or "study", or whatever is in the "eye of the beholder".

I bought a 1BR condo as a rental, with a 35 foot long, "living room" extending into a 10 foot long foyer. Legally, this huge room is a living room, one room, but it is so oversized that it was ridiculous. They can't put a bedroom into it, because it's got windows on the street side, but nothing along the long 35 foot side, and without windows, you can't have a bedroom.

What many people did, as I did, in the codno development was to section off 15 to 20 feet of the living room, and make it into another room, but with walls only going 8 foot up into the 12 foor ceilings. I put a wall to wall closet in. Some people call it a dining room. some the library, some a study, and still others call it an extra bedroom.

But it still does not change the fact that it is legally still a one BR condo unit. However, it does command a price higher than a 1BR apartment, sales wise and rent wise, because for all intensive purposes, you got an extra room, legal or not, which REAL 1 BR's does not have, and one is not paying the RE taxes or condo fees of a 2BR.

I rent out a house like that, a 3BR, with a 4th, and I advertise it as a 3 BR with a study, and many people seeing it would exclaim, wow, it's a 4 BR house. I sometimes think to myself, better let my customers proclaim it as a 4 BR, which it effectively is, and not have someone mutter "this guy has an illegal 4th BR".