Cabinets are Installed in the Study!!!

Hello everyone! I hope that you had a fantastic weekend because I sure know that I did! Matt came home from Aberdeen on Friday for a few days and my in-laws made it home safely after embarking on a two-month long safari through Africa (they are a seriously brave and adventurous pair). It was a weekend filled with happy homecomings and fantastic stories about my in-laws adventures over the pond. I also capped off the weekend at my mother's house for our weekly viewing of Game of Thrones (so freak'n awesome the week) and Mr. Selfridges (the show finally started getting juicy this week too). Good company and good times, it doesn't get much better than that! So after giving you the scoop last week about the DISASTER SET-BACK at the house, I am happy to share with you some actual progress that has been happening around the ol' casa...WE HAVE CABINETS!!!! Our custom cabinets for the study, laundry room, master and guest bathrooms, the game room and for a built-in next to the fireplace were installed and I couldn't be happier with how they turned out.  The post would be way too long if I showed you all the cabinets at once, so I have decided to break them out over a couple entries.  We are starting with the sweet new cabinets in the study/office to kick-off our little tour-o-cabinets. The study is at the top of the stairs and started out as a tiny 8' x 10' room with strange angled ceilings that made it pretty much useless.  The room is highlighted in yellow on the floor plan below.

 

And here is what the room looked like before demo started. 

 

 

Although the room was a cute and cozy, it was just too small (we could barely fit a chair and tiny desk in here) and desperately needed for its walls to be torn down to open the space up.  This is exactly what we did, and once the walls were removed, the tiny room turned into a large landing at the top of the new staircase.  You can see the new open landing highlighted in yellow on the floor plan below.

 

 Here is a view of the landing once the walls were removed and the drywall was installed. 

 

 

Since the landing was such a large and open space once the walls were removed, I thought the back wall would be a great location to put a large built-in desk.  I wanted to create a space that would allow for multiple work stations and give lots of storage.  So here is the design that I came up with:

This design allowed for us to have two large filing cabinets (the base cabinets on each end of the desk), two work stations, a large 36" base cabinet in the middle of the desks for printer and computer tower storage, four large upper cabinets to store all of our paper and office supplies and then some fun open shelves that I can fill with pictures and fun mementos.  Another goal was to keep the area light and bright (because there is not much natural light in the room), so I decided to go with bright white cabinets.  Here are some of the cabinets after they were delivered.

And here are the two filing cabinets.  I cannot wait to have one "go-to" location in the house to store our important documents.  It will make life so much easier to be organized!

And here are the cabinets installed (sorry for the poor picture quality and plastic covering over the base cabinets). I totally love how they turned out!!!

We still need to add the open shelves on the left side of the desk and the butcher block top, but this definitely constitutes progress in my book! Happy days oh happy days!!!

 Tomorrow I am going to show you the laundry room with its loverly cabinets, so I hope you swing back by.  In the mean time, thanks for dropping in and I hope that you have a fantastic day!!!

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Craft Room/Wrapping Closet Layout

Happy Friday everyone! I hope that you had a great week and have a fun weekend in store. We have a crazy one ahead of us with lots of Mardis Gras festivities. It will be busy, but a lot of fun! And I have to say, I am still super excited about getting the drywall up at the house and our doors.  Can't think of a better way to kick-off the weekend than that!

So a few weeks ago I told y'all about the unplanned closet that Matt and I got upstairs because of some A/C reworking.  And I don't know about you, but to me, getting an extra closet is like finding a pot of gold!  As I mentioned, my first thought was to create a craft room/wrapping closet to wrangle all of my crafting and wrapping goodies.  Well, unfortunately my super master plan all came to a screeching halt when Matt said that he thinks that we will need the extra closet to store random stuff that won't go anywhere else in the house. So that means, the only way I am going to get my craft room/wrapping closet is to get rid of some serious stuff around the casa.  For those of you who don't know me, I have a tendency to hoard keep random stuff around and never throw anything away...and it drives Matt crazy.  To actually get rid of enough stuff to be able to have an entire closet empty, is going to be a serious challenge for me!  But I want that wrapping closet, so somehow, someway, I am going to make this happen.  And to that I have to say "Well played Mattey, well played." 

 

So now onto the layout. The closet is a small walk-in and is 5 feet wide by 4 feet deep. Since it is a little small, I want to put all the storage on the back wall of the closet.  Here are a couple of my original inspiration pictures:

 

 

 

Aren't those spaces absolutely fabulous?!?!?!?! They make me smile every time I see them with all the bright colors and pretty cabinets.  Those rooms are obviously much larger than the space that I have; however, they give a great starting point to get the creative juices flowing.  I absolutely love the wrapping paper/ribbon holders in those photos.  And I think the baskets are a great way to add in some texture.  I also like the idea of having lots of drawers to store tissue paper, boxes, tags, scissors, etc. on the bottom of the closet. As I mentioned before, I think that Martha Stewart's flat filing cabinet will do just the trick. Here is what she looks like:
 

Once I figured out the basic elements that I want in the closet, I busted out my handy dandy graph paper and came up with this layout:

As you can see, I took the ideas from those absolutely fabulous inspiration rooms and tried to make them fit my space.  In the middle of the closet, I will put the Martha Stewart flat filing cabinet.  I have about six inches on either side of the cabinet, so thought this would be a great space to add some tiny shelves to store seasonal wrapping paper that I can display up top when its the right time of the year.  Above the flat filing cabinet, I plan to add a some dowels so that I can hang all of my ribbon.  The Martha Stewart flat filing cabinet is pretty deep, so I should still have plenty of room on top for a good work space.  Above the ribbon, I plan on putting some more dowels for my wrapping paper.  On either side of the wrapping paper, I will have open shelves where I can add some pretty baskets for all of my crafting goodies.  I also want to add a fold-out table on the closet door so that I can have an extra worktop for wrapping large presents.  This is what I have in mind:

 

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I found this sweet one online that looks fun and has additional storage behind the table:

 

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However, the whole contraption will have to be fairly light since it will hang on the door instead of a wall.  So I think that we will probably have to build it ourselves, which should be fun!  So that is all for now.  I hope you have a great weekend and thanks for stopping by!!!

It’s a Wrap...Getting Crafty In My New Craft Room‼!

The renovations are still progressing at the house; however, we have been working on all the "behind the scenes" projects over the past 4 weeks (i.e. electrical, plumbing, HVAC, etc.), so there hasn't been very much visible transformations at the house like there was when we were doing demo and moving walls. Although this work is just as important…it is not nearly as exciting from a blog/picture perspective. However, I just received some of the best news that a girl can ever receive…I'M GETTING A WHOLE NEW CLOSET that was not originally called for in the plans‼‼‼‼‼! Que Jessee Spano – "I'm so excited! I'm so excited! I'm so, I'm so, I'm so (NOT) scared Zach!"

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Please tell me you remember that epic moment from Saved By the Bell!  The new closet actually came about because of unplanned changes we have to make to the HVAC system. About a year ago, we had to replace our old air conditioner after it kicked the bucket, so we planned on keeping it even with the renovations because it was effectively brand new AC unit. However, with the additional square footage that we are adding to the house (i.e. the new bedroom, game room extension and dining room extension), our air conditioner unit is not large enough to service the whole house and we have to add another unit (one to service the upstairs and one to service the down stairs). No biggie right? WRONG‼! I have now learned that there are two rules with air conditioners: (1) air conditioners do not work properly if they are too small for the space they are servicing (totally makes sense), and (2) air conditioners do not work properly if they are too large for the space they are servicing (excuse me…come again?!?). Apparently, if an air conditioner unit is too large, it will cool down the space too quickly. This is a problem because the air conditioner will only run for a few a minutes and will not have time to properly circulate the air. In Houston, that means that the humidity will never be circulated out of the house which can lead to mold problems. ICK‼! So, long story longer, we are having to replace our current AC unit with a new smaller unit. It's frustrating…but every cloud has a silver lining right? So here is where the new closet comes in. Our HVAC system used to be the attic space above our bedroom, which is outlined in red below.

Since we have turned the attic space into the new fourth bedroom, we originally planned to keep the HVAC system where it was and just build a closet around it. You can see the HVAC closet below in red:

Well, now that we are adding in all new HVAC system, the AC man has moved the entire HVAC unit from the second floor into the attic…which means new closet for me‼‼ Woohoo! Once I found out about this new little slice of heaven, I immediately thought – Craft Room / Wrapping Room! The space is approximately 5 feet wide by 4 feet deep. I have been searching the internet for inspiration and just discovered the Martha Stewart Craft Furniture at Home Depot. OMG, the stuff is awesome‼! How I didn't know that she had an entire line of craft room furniture before this is beyond me. I love all the pieces in the collection, especially the 8 drawer flat filing cabinet:

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LOVE!!! This will fit perfectly in the closet and will be a great place to store all my tissue paper, boxes, tags, etc.  I think that it will also give me some space on either side of the filing cabinet for some baby shelves.  I also want to add some cool wrapping paper storage above the filing desk as well as some large shelves to provide a home where my crafting goodies can live.  I think this will help with overall organization, since the closet is such a small space. Here are some pictures of some super cool craft rooms and wrapping rooms that have inspired me.

 



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This little space is obviously a "work in imagination" for me…but I will keep you posted once I get a layout drawn up and have my color scheme in place. How about y'all…do you have a great craft room ideas or storage suggestions?  Please feel free to share them (or a link) in the comments below, because I would love to see your ideas!  Thanks for stopping by and I hope that you have a wonderful day‼!