The Domino Projects: The Catch All Room Deconstruction

So the Domino Projects are under way.  They are all centered around areas in our home that we have identified as areas that need work and are mostly centered around our Catch-All room.  While I didn't get any "true" before photos.  These photos were taken after a 2 trash bags of garbage and recycling had been removed from the room as well as a pile of broken down cardboard.  I love how it's turning out now that the work is underway and I know that I will have some awesome after photos pretty soon.

In this first picture, the wall that's clear, has been cleared of two shelves and a pile worth of stuff.  You can also see the beginning of the new paint color for the room:

Here you see my "quick grab keep G-Girl busy project pockets", more [unfinished] shelves of stuff that needs to be sorted, the black blinds who's days are numbered and just piles of junk!  Oh, and if you look close, you can see the industrial quality carpet that is glued directly to the slab of our house.  It's really warm in February, let me tell you!  (Keeping it real, folks.)

 

More piles.  The cabinets were once the center of operations for my candles but that has since moved to a smaller corner of the house and these cabinets will be removed and re-purposed in our bathrooms.

So there it is, in all it's messiness.  The Catch-All, Junk Room will soon be an inviting family space.

Sunday Sunshine: Summer Toes

Practicing contentment by remembering the graces of the week and practicing gratitude through giving. 

So, my last Sunday Sunshine was definitely the case of trying to find the good in a rather difficult week.  Let's be honest here, we all have them.  But that's why I love my Sunday Sunshine practice: it forces me to focus on the good going on and not get caught up and dwell on all the things that are driving me nuts!  This is the Stuff by Francesca Battistelli  has been a fun-  rolling around in my head-top of the Pandora list-theme song for the last few weeks and while everyone's "stuff" is different it's been a good reminder.

It's been easier to find the good in the last couple of weeks.  Highlights have included moms' night out (aka book club), a great MOPs morning.  It was the "pamper yourself" day.  I left with pretty toes for summer with the help of a friend when getting to my left foot proved a bit more challenging than I had planned on thanks to Itty Bitty positioned just right on a nerve in my hip.

Itty Bitty (aka- baby due in June) continues to grow and develop healthily and I am so thankful to have a doctor who I actually enjoy going in to see.  

To go with the pretty summer toes we have also had great spring weather to bust out the sandals, enjoyable play time outside, walks on the field,  laundry dried on the clothes line.   This is by far my most favorite time of year.

I'm thankful that the Domino Projects are moving along nicely and that I have had some time to write to go along with all the work we've done.  I love the finished products as they come about and am enjoying our home even more.

The sun is out, the sky is blue.  What's not to like?

Every desirable and beneficial gift comes out of heaven. The gifts are rivers of light cascading down from the Father of Light.” (James 1:16 -The Message) May the light of the Father brighten your week!

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.