Ta- DA! Finished Green Room

So if you also follow our family blog, this is kind of a repeat-except from my perspective.  Since most of you don't - enjoy!  You'll remember the "before shots" from a few weeks back as this project was in progress.

Here are the "after shots".  I still need to get some things up on the walls -  photos and such, but small details in scheme of the project!  De-junking was by far the largest part of this project for me and there are still a couple boxes stashed in corners that I have to finish going through.  HandyMan did a fabulous job on the flooring and it is such an improvement over the previous floor covering: industrial carpet that was glued to the slab that is the foundation of our house!

 So the freezer has a new corner and we added shelving above it for large kitchen items, canning jars, and extra pantry space.  The DVD player and Roku will eventually go on a small shelf under the TV.  The table also doubles as work space for kid crafts, my sewing or just setting up a laptop.

The quick-project pockets and the utility shelves are now on the wall where the freezer was and organized so that toys and supplies can be easily found.  A coat of paint to the mounted shelves leave a more finished look than what I started with before.  

Comfy place to watch TV from and my cabinet of sewing stuff in the corner, finish out the room.

Short of the flooring which was budgeted as part of a larger home improvement project, I cleaned this room up for about $75 and used a lot of things we already had on hand.  Here's a rough breakdown:
$10 - Toy Baskets (more about these later!)
$30 - Gallon of paint for the walls
$15 - Shelving brackets
$7 - 3M Command Strips and hooks to hang stuff
$13 - Curtains (there's another story here too that I may get to later)

Items we had on hand that I used included white and dark green paint used for shelves,  polycrylic that I used on the shelves and white utility shelves.

I'm so excited to have this project actually finished (for the most part) and to have (another) comfortable place to hang out in our house.  We like to have multi-purpose space in the house and while this will mostly serve as a play room and tv room, it will also convert easily into guest space in the event of large gatherings.  We simply break down the table and pull out the air mattress.  While we had done that in this room before, it is now a much prettier guest space!

The Domino Projects: Identifying the Problem Areas

The Domino Projects started by identifying an area we wanted to improve in our home: a larger eat-in kitchen area.  Once that was resolved and the flooring was installed in the kitchen it was time to finish the flooring project.  We purchased enough flooring to install it in a bedroom off the kitchen that has been a catch all area for the last 5 years.  It was time to look at the Catch All Room.

In order to put the flooring into the Catch-All Room, everything needs to come out. It was really a blessing in disguise that everything has to come out.  It has forced me to re-think the space, under the influence of pregnancy nesting hormones, and I really thought about what I wanted to go back into the space and how we want to use the space in the coming months and years.  I thought about other problem areas in the house and how they may be resolved.  And the dominoes started falling.

Here's the list of 10 areas that we came up with. Some solutions will be big projects, and some small but all lined up in the Domino Projects list, in no particular order:

1.  Need to put flooring in the Catch-All room.
2.  My candle stuff taking up more space in the house and less time being devoted to the business.
3. Toy chaos in the living room.
4. The clothing hampers lived behind the bathroom door and you couldn't open the door the whole way.  This really bothered GTot!
5. Makeshift storage in the downstairs bathroom, looks makeshift, not finished, and is not well utilized.  (and needs to be cleaned out!)
6. Large kitchen items and canning jars and supplies that don't have good storage spaces.  
7. A Catch-All room that has been catching all kinds of junk for five years and needs some serious reorganization and de-junking!   
8. After I spent some time in the Catch-All Room working on #6, I realized that the walls looked awful - dingy and dirty and like they may never have been painted, just primed.  Or maybe just flat white 17 years ago.  Blech!
9. Current guest room space needs to be converted over to kid's room space.
10. New guest room space needs to be re-established so that we can easily host grandparents, family and friends! 

Introducing The Domino Projects

Have you ever started a quick project only to have it domino into a much bigger line of projects than you had planned?  We are in the middle of such a line of projects.

We are blessed to have a house that is more than enough house for two adults and one (soon to be two) small children.  But the designer (and I use that term loosely) of our house made some floor plan decisions that I would not have made had I been around when the house was built.  But I wasn't here so we're modifying as we go and we seem to be constantly working to make the space work for us.

Rewind to Spring 2011. Our house was perfect for our little family of three.  We could all sit at the counter in the kitchen for meals in the cold seasons and usually ate out on the screened in porch as soon as it was warm enough.  We have plenty of room in bedrooms and all was good.  Then we started talking about expanding our family.  Family dinners are important to us and if our family grew, we would no longer fit around the counter.  So we started exploring our options for expanding an eat-in kitchen area.

We knew the job was more than we wanted to do ourselves so last spring we accessed some inheritance funds and hired a contractor to do the work while we were away (best choice we could have made!)  So this little project was the start of the Domino Projects.  We only had the contractors do the basic work and we did the finish work.  I painted and then we began preparing for flooring. While we saved up, HandyMan worked to put leveling strips out to prepare for flooring (using wood pieces he had around in the garage) and we started saving.  We thought putting the flooring would be the finish of the project.  Little did I realize it was the beginning of the Domino Projects.

The Domino Projects are a series of projects that are in my head to maximize the space we have in our home to create the best storage and inviting floor space.  I'm working to utilize what we have in the house already and spend as little as possible.  I am so excited to see how it all turns out so follow along, get ideas and make the most of your space.