A Facelift

There are several small projects we're tackling while Jamey is on winter break and several motivations involved.  One is that while certain arrangements of areas have worked well in the past, a growing family necessitates change.  Another motivation is to make areas easier to live in/more functional.  A third is the desire to rid our home of things we no longer need/use.  For us, this means donating them to a thrift store that supports MCC with it's proceeds or taking the items to consignment.  Another reason may be the fact that Jamey and I have been watching episodes of Hoarders lately (via Netflix) and while we are not hoarders, the show does point out the illogical thinking that's involved in keeping things you will not use/need (in a reasonable amount of time).  Others could make much better use of most of it.

Living in a 120-year-old house with little closet/storage space makes making these challenges...well...challenging. Especially when we're committed spending very little money to make these changes happen.

The project we started with was our laundry room.  The picture below shows the room in full-use mode.  I don't have a before picture, but imagine there is no shelving above the washing machine.  The shelves are what we added.  Where else am I going to store roller skate and blade boxes, gift bags to reuse, beach toys beach towels, and my tool box?

Over the past couple weeks, we focused on our mud room.  If this room was truly just the back door where only family and very close friends entered the house it would be one thing, but no one uses our front door (except the UPS man).  This means it matters very much to me how the mud room looks.  It's impossible to keep everything in it's place when you have three children at home full time.  That goal was let go by me years and years ago.  I DO care what the very first room visitors enter might look like.

For years, two coat trees held our families coats, bags, umbrellas, etc. just fine.  Lately, as you can see below, it wasn't working as well.  The coat trees began to look like really tall piles of clutter.  It also made getting into our outer/unheated mudroom (where we keep potatoes and squash and Jamey's outdoor work clothes) nearly impossible to get to without rearranging everything.

Our solution was to install two sets of hooks- one higher for grown up things and one lower for the kids.  Jamey and I each have four hooks above and each child has two.  Each hook has places to hang two items, so this gives us ample space.  The shelf gives me some space to display a couple things that will hopefully make the room more inviting.  The giant box is our shoe box.  Only wet/snowy boots are allowed to set outside the box (now under the kid's coats).

Between the doors, Jamey installed a set of two hooks to hold our egg basket and recycling bag.  Our grocery bags hang on the door knob of the outer mudroom door.

I'm thrilled with the change.  It's easier to find what I'm looking for and the kids can hang up their things without knocking other peoples things onto the floor.  We can get in and out of the outer mud room with ease.

Now, on to the next mini project- the office.