Laundry Room Love Affair

 

Happy Friday everyone! Are you ready for the weekend? I sure am! Matt managed to score tickets to the Rockets game tonight, so look for us on TV (we'll be the ones in red and cheering for the Rockets...so super easy to spot right?).  Today I am here to tell you about an exciting new romance in my life...and no, it's not another man, but a room full wonder, excitement, and mystique that I have fallen head-over-heals, blow-me-away, going absolute gaga, in love with...our new laundry room!  I pretty much turn into Tom every time I walk by the little beauty. 

Here

To help you understand why I am so excited about my loverly laundry room, I have to take you back and show you what our old garage "laundry room" looked like before the renovation started.  Here she is...try not to be too jealous:

 

 

Yeap...it was effectively a washer and dryer in the garage (oh, and the cute little shelf that Matt DIY'ed so that we would have a space to put the detergent and hangers).  So in other words, we had no laundry room. At first I didn't think that it would bother me too much since the garage is attached to the house and it wouldn't be difficult to get to (Matt, on the other hand, would tell you that is because I don't do laundry...but I do, just not as often as I should...and maybe I have been known to go to to the store to buy new socks and skivvies instead of taking the time to wash clothes...but hey, a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do, and isn't shopping so much more entertaining than laundry?).



  

However, after just one load of laundry where everything could not go in the dryer and had to be air dried, I realized we were in trouble because every possible hanging location in the house was covered with drying laundry and this is what the inside of our house effectively turned into on laundry day:

Here

...which, on certain days, felt like you had just stepped behind-the-scene onto a Victoria Secrets photo shoot...quite the conversation starter when company unexpected turned up.  Good times!  So, long story longer, we quickly realized that we were in desperate need of an actual laundry room inside our house.  A few months ago I explained how we were able to create space for the laundry room, but just to remind you, the laundry room will live on the second floor between the landing and the game room.  You can see it highlighted in yellow on the floor plan below.
 

It is a pretty big room and we decided that it would function best to have the washer and dryer and a floor to ceiling cabinet on one wall. I also wanted space to dry clothes above the washer and dryer..so came up with this layout:

On the other wall, I wanted to have lower cabinets with a sink, upper cabinets and open shelves. Here is a mock-up of my design for this wall...just imagine that there a is a sink in the middle base cabinet:

We decided to install shelves between the two upper cabinets instead of an actual cabinet to allow for more room to hand wash big ticket items in the sink like duvet covers. Also, although I played around with the idea of lantern tiles and some fun floral tile, I have ultimately decided to go with classic beveled subway tiles.  I love the clean look they give...and since this room has no windows, I thought they would help keep the space bright and airy. Here is what the tiles will looked like when they are installed:

Here

 

 And here is the faucet that we have picked out for the space.

Here

I love the fact that the high goose neck will give me additional space when washing items in the sink. The spayer will also help wash away any soap on the garments.  We are also using carrara marble for the counter top, so we picked the polished chrome faucet like the picture (and I know most of you probably think that I am nuts for putting carrara marble in the laundry room, be we are using carrara marble in our guest bath and had a lot left over on the slab...so instead of letting it go to waste, we decided to use it in the laundry room...scratches be dammed!). And this is the sink that we chose. 


Here

 

It is a Blanco sink and is actually made of pulverized granite. This means that it will never scratch (like how cast iron sinks can get scratch up). It is also super deep...which, if you are seeing a pattern, will also help with hand washing garments.  We even have the cabinets installed now (happy dance)...here are the upper cabinets after they were delivered:

 

And here is the sink cabinet and the floor-to-ceiling cabinet that will go next to the washer and dryer:

 

And now for the big reveal. This is the sink-side of the laundry room....love!!!

 

 

 And this is washer and dryer side of the laundry room with the shelf in place that will sit above the washer and dryer.

 

 

 Oh I am so freak'n excited with how the room is turning out! And I ain't going to lie...I have spent way too much time doing the Carlton in this space:

 

 

So let's take one last look at the before and after of our laundry room before we go!

 

Next up, granite, tile and paint.  I can't wait to see how she turns out when we are complete!  Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful weekend!!!

 

 

I am sharing this post on Pinworth Projects, Design and Diapers and the Inspire Me Please Link Party

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!!!

I am sharing this post on Pinworthy Projects, Inspire Me Please Link Party, Shine on Fridays and Catch as Catch Can Link Party

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:

 

Here

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

 

Here

 

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!!!

Houston We Have Drywall (& a LaCantina Door)!

Hello everyone!  I hope that you have all been fantastic over the past few weeks.  Sorry about being awol for so long, but Matt and I were in Florence for a week for his work's annual meeting and then I have been going 150% at my job since getting back with a big project that has a tight deadline.  However, I had to share with you the exciting progress happening at the house.  The two biggest things are that we now have drywall and exterior doors! Holla!!!!  So let's take a tour of the casa to see how she looks with walls and doors shall we?

 

First I have to show you the super cool La Cantina door that we added that I first talked about here.  This door separates the living room from the back of the house and looks like a wall of french doors.

 

 

 

However, with the flick of a few locks and tiny bit of pushing....the doors completely fold-up to bring the outside in. Can I getta "TAH-DAD"?!?!?!

I am here to tell you that these bad boys are AWESOME!!! I love them because they literally double the size of the our living room when they are open. We are going to have some serious entertaining happening with these guys during the 8 months out of the year that we have good weather in Houston.  Here is a video of them in action. My commentary does not do justice my super cool happy dance that was happening behind the camera.

 

So now that you have seen the doors in action, I want to take you on a tour of the house with drywall.  Here is the floor plan of the downstairs, so that you can see the placement of the rooms.

 

 



Here is the view into the living room from the back patio.  The wine room is on the right under the stairs, the dining room is on the left of the door, and the entrance to the kitchen is in the left corner of the picture.

This is a view standing with my back to the wine room and looking towards the backyard.  Please excuse the disastrous landscaping (or complete lack there of) because all that will be addressed once we get finished with the remodel.

 

This picture is taken from the middle of the living room so that you can see the dining room.  It is crazy how much bigger everything looks in person once dry wall is up!  I guess it is difficult to judge the size of a room when you only have the studs.  You can also see our front door.  It is all wrapped up for safe keeping...but when the plastic is gone, it is beautiful.  As you can see, it is a similar style to a lot of the door I liked here. I love all the natural light that the windows and sidelights bring into the house.  And it will be even brighter once the protective film is removed from the windows.  Oh I can't wait!!!

 

This next picture shows our master bedroom.  It was a little difficult to photograph with my Canon Elf, but at least you can get a general idea of the room's shape.

 

 

Now onto the master bathroom (A.K.A. Jenn's happy place).  This is a view into the master bath from the master bedroom.  Here you can see the closet is in the back and the walk-in shower on the right. The tub will live to the right of the shower and our vanities will live on the left wall opposite of the shower.

 

This is a picture of the inside of the master closet.  You can't tell much from the photo, but it is 13' long by 10' wide.  I will show you my master plan for the master closet in a later post.

Here is another view of the back wall of the master bathroom. As you can see, the shower will be on the left side of the wall and the claw foot tub will be on the right under the window. We have his and her shower heads and body sprays, along with a rain shower overhead.  Matt gave me so much flack about having a "his-and-her" shower...but I think he will love it once it is all said and done.

Here is a close-up of the shower layout.  Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!!!  This makes me giddy like a school girl!

This is a close-up of the wine room under the stairs.  We are going to have wine shelves in the recessed space on the right and on the back wall. I will show all the details in a later post.

Now we are going to head upstairs.  Here is the floor plan for the second floor so that you can get your bearings.

 



The first thing you see when you head up the stairs is the study.  We will have built-in cabinets and a desk along the back wall.

Next we head into the revised game room.  It's amazing how far it has come since we blew out the front wall.  This is a view from the back corner of the room looking towards the study, which you can see through the door.

Here is another view of the game room from the front side of the house.  We are going to add a built-in bar in the nook on the left.  And through the door, you can see the entrance to the laundry room.  I showed you some of my ideas for the laundry room here.

This is a view of the hallway leading to the back of the house.  To my left is the study and to my right are the stairs, game room and laundry room.  As you walk down the hall, the first door on the left is the entrance to the guest bathroom, the first door on the right is my wrapping room (which is not labeled in this picture), the second door on the right is Bedroom 3 (A.K.A. the "Blue Room"), and the final door in the middle is the entrance to the new bedroom above our master (Bedroom 4).

Here is a picture of Bedroom 4. It is directly above our master bedroom, so is basically identical.

 

 

When you turn around and leave Bedroom 4, you are back in the hall heading towards the study and Bedroom 2 (A.K.A. the "Teepee Room"). As you head down the hall, the first door to my left is the entrance to the Blue Room (which you can't see in this photo) and the second door to the left is my wrapping closet.  I talked about my initial plans for the layout of the wrapping closet here and here.  The first door on the right is the guest bathroom, followed by the study and the Teepee Room.

 

 

Here is a pitiful little picture of part of the guest bathroom. We will have two vanities on either side of the window and to the right are the shower and toilette. I need to invest in a super wide lens so that I can get better pictures for everyone!

 

 

After you exit the guest bathroom and enter the study facing the Teepee Room, this is the view you will see.  To my left are the stairs and to my right is the study.  Directly in front of me is the entrance to the Teepee Room.  Two closets flank the entry into the Teepee Room.

Here is what the Teepee Room loooks like on the inside.  It is a long (23') and narrow (11') room with an arched roof.  This will likely become our kiddo's game room with all sorts of fun murals.  It just feels like a place you want to play when you go in.  I also added built-in storage into the eaves...cause hey, if there is a possible open space, I will use it!  Our builder makes so much fun of me for that - but trust me, we will love all the additional storage at some point down the road, I just know it!  We will have doors on the front of the opening that will look like wainscoting so they won't be so obtrusive. 

  

So that finishes up the tour of the casa with dry wall.  Also, thank you so much for stopping by, I hope that you liked seeing the progress!  Have a wonderful day!!!