Bathroom Demo
We’ve broken ground (literally) in the mother-in-law suite and completed most of the demo work. It was a good five hours of work, but actually a ton of fun! We found some very interesting things behind the walls and floor.
Styled Bookshelves | DIY Built-ins
Finishing Built-in Bookshelves
Woohoo! My bookshelf dreams are officially actualized. We are so happy with how this whole wall turned out. DIY built-in bookshelves don’t have to be hard. In fact, they went fairly smoothly. If you missed the original build, check out this post first. Then come back here where I have the easy job of showing a bunch of finished after pictures. I got to play with my new camera Joe gifted me for Christmas, so it made photographing these shelves extra fun.
DIY Built-in Bookshelves
DIY Built-in Bookshelves
Alright, I must confess: I was 100% all for jumping on the IKEA hack bandwagon for this project. There are so many tutorials about retrofitting the “Billy” cabinet to make floor-to-ceiling bookcases. But when the dimensions didn’t fit our space, we had no choice but to go for a custom solution. And that’s usually where the best ideas are hiding.
Before
You can ask Joe, this was probably the thing I was most excited about when we moved into the house. It was at the top of my list, but not high priority compared to some other projects.
DIY Rustic Bathroom Shelves
DIY Rustic Industrial Shelves
I have to confess. This is my favorite part of the entire bathroom. (If you missed any of the bathroom remodel that we did this past winter, you can recap right over here.) I knew I wanted some really chunky wood shelves for the little nook above the toilet, but Joe surprised me with something better than I could have imagined.
Bathroom Remodel | Framing the Shower
We Have Walls
They’re up! We just have to get them covered with sheetrock, but they’re looking good already. I’ve never done this, so it was all a learning experience for me. I even got to use gunpowder to nail into the concrete! It took me a few tries, but I finally made it through.
Bathroom Demo | Phase 3: Ceiling and Duct Work
Blue Side
Strong side! We finally made it to the other side of the wall. The brown side is getting pretty old, so I’m glad to be on the blue side for awhile. We’re definitely tired of looking at that brown/tan paint! Can’t wait to pick out some new colors.
But first, we need to see where we can add the new shower. We have no idea what’s behind these walls or in the ceiling tiles, so we need to scope out the situation before we can make any firm decisions as to where things go. Joe’s going to walk you through taking off the old closet door trim, and share what he’s looking for.
Garage “Mud Room”
Maxing out Garage Storage
Ideally, we’d love to have an actual mudroom or entryway some day, but for now, we are making do with the space we have. If you know us, you know we I have a lot of shoes. There’s really not a great space in our house for our shoes to live, so we’ve been keeping them in the garage.
Well, we’ve engineered a somewhat functional solution that we hope to keep improving. It’s a big improvement actually. With winter on the way, this will give us a central location for all the snow pants, jackets, hats and everything else. And it’s a step up from keeping them all in bins!
Reorganizing the Crawlspace
This has been a long time coming. When we moved in, we discovered this incredible secret storage area know as the crawlspace. After moving from a slightly larger house, we needed a place to put boxes and miscellaneous things that either didn’t fit, or we didn’t have a place for right away. So into the crawlspace they went. And the garage. But that’s a whole other story… It was finally time to tackle our storage area and get things to their homes. We spent our staycation working on this, and a few other big projects.
Spare Room Conversion
Brown or Purple?
You be the judge. We really love this paint color, but everyone seems to have a different take on it. Depending on the lighting and time of day, it looks either brown or purple. Or both! For the record, it was in the brown section of Pittsburg Paint, but it must have some purple undertones.
A Shelf Shelter
Some people bring home stray pets.
Others bring home stray shelves… Wait, what? Only my boyfriend, apparently. Now that I think about it, there are many refurbished pieces of furniture around the house. I wish I had taken pictures of all our shelves, but here are the latest and greatest.
Moral of the story
There are plenty of unwanted shelves out there, so rescue one from your local goodwill or salvation army today. We have fostered quite a few in recent months, and it all started with this one: