Starting New Projects

While we spent a fair amount of time celebrating family this weekend, we also got a much needed head start on the next set of projects in the house. We have several projects we are working on at once, but one of the bigger projects we are starting on is the renovation of our mudroom, pantry/laundry room, and family room bathroom. Our first step was getting rid of the cabinets in our "pantry" area. We think that the room must have originally been a craft room, but for us it works perfectly as a place to store the "extras" from our kitchen as well as a stock area for groceries on those rare occasions when I have the time and energy to plan a massive coupon/sales savings trip. Maybe now that I'm done with my MA, I'll have more time for that. Of course, that could just be wishful thinking. On Friday night, this is what our pantry looked like:


And this is what the room looked like before we moved into the house

On a whim I decided to post the cabinets on Craigslist. Within 12 hours, the cabinets were sold, removed from the walls, and we had an empty room to fill. With the money we got from the sale, we were able to purchase new shelves that we could use for new, more complete storage. Jeff worked with our daughter's "help" to put together the first set of shelves and then put together the second set of shelves today. We now have extra shelf space that can be easily moved and rearranged.


Of course, the walls were significantly torn up by both the installation and the removal of the cabinets, which means this back room needs to be repainted. I like "simple" paint jobs ("simple" because no paint job is super easy, but at least this own doesn't involve the removal of wallpaper) so I'm looking forward to selecting a new paint color for the room that will serve as both pantry and laundry area. I'm thinking a very light, subtle green or blue. That is a little in the air at the moment, as we have other things to do in the room first, but we already like the transformation.

The bigger transformation is in our back mudroom off of the garage. When we moved in it was a dark, narrow passage with paneling and two large closets that we have used for storage of paint and our camping equipment. This weekend the camping equipment and paint got moved to other locations and Jeff took out the closets. The back room went from looking like this:

Before we even moved into the house





To this:




The rest of the paneling needs to come down and walls need to be repaired but the space is already significantly more spacious and starting to look brighter. It is a good start, and we're not really sure what to think about the extra space except I'm now wondering why we didn't do it sooner. I'm hoping that we'll be able to share more of our work in the coming weeks.

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