It All Comes Together

If you are still reading this saga, you are either super patient or super bored! If you haven't read the past two days, I'll take a minute and catch you up to speed...Our old house has no laundry room. It does however have a super great sewing closet which slowly turned into a junk closet. What it lacks in the laundry room department, it makes up for in having two small coat closets. We purged and merged our coats into one closet and turned the other into a cloffice. This left us with an empty closet and still no laundry room...

Empty Closet + No Laundry Room =

Laundry Closet

lauset is the technical french name

Today it's making its big debut! With further ado, I would like to introduce the best thing we have done to our old house...

I keep the things I use daily within easy reach

the Smurfs lunchboxes

two shelves of cleaning supplies

I L.O.V.E. this new area we created! We purchased a new washer and dryer and stacked them. I had enough room for a small (but big enough) shelving unit to put beside them. We didn't want anything permanent to make maintenance to the machines easier. The shelves are on felt pads and they are super easy to slide in and out. Behind them I mounted the iron and ironing board to the back wall. This has been a wonderful use of space! Mr. T and I are beyond thrilled...and I can't say that enough!

If you are up to speed...you might wonder where this leaves our kitchen/laundry room/breakfast nook? Once again...stay tuned...

Rachel :)

As the House Turns

I've been rambling for a few weeks now about changes and switches we've been doing in our old house. Remember this post about the wonderful sewing closet Mr. T built for me last summer? At some point it went from looking wonderful to looking like this:

real life is not always pretty!

My wonderful sewing closet had turned into a...gasp...junk closet! Truth be told, I wasn't sewing too much and when I was it was bigger projects that required the use of the dining room table. I would take everything I needed out...and then shove it back in. Since it looked like this for a while we decided to "downsize." I went through all of everything in the closet and made some decisions. We had two coat closets we merged into one and turned our other coat closet into this:


With all of the switcheroos going on, we now had an empty closet. Here is what it looked like:

not entirely empty, but you get the point.
this wood was given a coat of stain and a new life in the cloffice!

It was the perfect size and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it! Stay tuned...

Rachel :)

From Coat Closet to Cloffice

Spring is officially here which has lead to fruit basket turnover at our old house. We have done away with the wonderful sewing closet that Mr. T built last summer. I'll post more about that later. There are two other closets we have, both of which were terribly packed and full of...stuff! We took some time, sorted and condensed, and were able to move what we needed into one closet. The rest of the stuff was packed and put into our newly organized attic while some things were packed and sent to Goodwill. It was a super easy decision on what to do with our empty extra closet...turn it into a cloffice!

I wanted a space for my sewing and other crafty supplies. Brainy Smurf and Smurfette wanted a homework area. Mr T wanted a spot for the family computer so we would leave his office alone. Ummmmmm...that's a lot of stuff crammed into a 4 foot x 2 1/2 foot space...watch out! We had to dig deep for this project and we were on a serious budget. I started shaking paint cans, trying to find the one with the most in it. We settled on Restoration Hardware Silver Sage. It's the same color we have in the Master Bedroom, but we didn't have to buy paint! I also had left over chalkboard paint from this project. We recycled the the wood from the former sewing closet and I managed to find a few old cans of stain and polyurethane in the shed. We were set!

 

before

 

 

We started by taping out the chalkboard area and cutting in with the wall paint. Mr. T put in side boards for the desk to lay on. He measured and cut the old desk, then I sanded and stained. We wanted to leave the old shelf in the top of the closet along with the old iron clothing rod. When we were ready to put it all together, the desk went in first, then the shelf, and the cubbies up top. I went through all of the items in the previous sewing area and had to get rid of a lot of fabric. No worries though! I saved what I needed and got rid of the fluff! The cubbies and top shelf are devoted to my sewing machine and supplies, fabric, and craft paint. The desk is just for the kiddos. I mounted a bulletin board with their practice schedules on it along with some fun family photos. There is a hanging organizer on the opposite wall with plenty of notebook paper and rulers. I keep a pencil jar stocked with sharpened pencils for homework. Under the desk I have a large drawer set on wheels filled with scrapbooking materials. In the center is a woven basket with wrapping paper, tissue, and gift bags. On the right side is a 3 drawer organizer with more sewing supplies. All of this is super organized, but hidden with a skirt I made for the desk. Our new area is family friendly, super organized, and we love it!

top of the shelf...all of my sewing stuff

Mission accomplished!!! Sewing closet + homework desk + family computer = one very efficient space = one happy family!

Rachel :)