Headed back home - new york house tour - part 3

When we bought this house, the basement was not finished.  An entire floor of potential.  I will do a separate post on how we finished it - because it deserves it's own post - and how Chad did most of the work.

For now, here is our basement.

We created three rooms/areas.  The kids gameroom:

One of my favorite parts of the house is this pocket door Chad added!  The cabinet below holds board games, puzzles, paint and craft supplies.  Behind the pocket door is a storage area, all of the "workings" of the house (furnace, water heaters, etc.) and a workshop area for Chad.  

Plenty of room for playing with Barbies, Legos, Nerf battles, and Xbox games.

The next room/area is my workout space:

And just past the workout space is my (and the girls!) craft room:

The girls love to paint so we made a gallery wall for them.  They can hang up their new paintings as they create them.  Ella loves to rearrange them!

That is it for the inside of the house!  Maybe I will round up some outside pictures of our backyard next!

Headed back home - new york house tour - part 2

Time to move upstairs!  

All of our bedrooms are located upstairs as well as the laundry room.  Our current New York house is approximately 2,500 square feet.  Our Texas house was around 4,000 square feet and had an extra garage.  I have decluttered and purged my heart out!  It was a lot of work to get rid of so much, but we don't miss it ONE BIT!

Molly's favorite spot at the top of the stairs:

Our master bedroom:

Our master bathroom:

Our master closet:

Olivia's room:

Ella's room:

 Our laundry room:

Caleb's room:

And the kids bathroom:

Next up, the basement!

Secret laundry room redo - cabinets

I wrote this posts months ago.  Months.  As you are reading this, our house has been professionally packed up, loaded into a truck and transported to New York, where it will sit in storage until we find our new home.  Our house is scheduled to close tomorrow.

But, for now, let's go back and catch up on what has been going on over the past few months.


While Chad has been traveling for work, I have been decluttering the house and purging as much as I can.  My goal is to continue to purge and organize until I reach some sense of simplicity in this house.  Less is more.  Less is better.

While decluttering in the laundry room the other day, I decided it was time to hide those items that are stored on the shelves above the washer and dryer.  I texted Dad to see how much he thought unfinished cabinets would cost and he was on board to go look with me.  Blame him, Chad ;-)

We measured and shopped around and decided on four unfinished cabinets.  We (okay, just me) decided we needed to get this job done before Chad came home.  Sometimes Chad likes to research and shop and plan a little too much and I wanted this d-o-n-e DONE!

Here are a few pictures of what the laundry room tends to look like.  I am hanging my head in shame...

It is a big room, with lots of hanging space that is perfect for the kids clothes.  I don't want to lose that space, but I do want to hide the clutter and create a cleaner look in there.

This is the other side of the laundry room.  We will visit this area again.  Soon.

Dad and I set up shop in the garage and got to work prepping and painting the cabinets.   Remember, Chad is working in New York and doesn't yet know about this project.

Dad and I finished painting the cabinets and it was time for Chad to come home.  I picked Chad up from the airport and within minutes of being home, he turned and said, "Let's talk about those cabinets..."  Uh oh ;-)

After explaining my idea and convincing him that this would be great storage and would finally clean up our laundry room, he was on board.  Whew!

The next day we went to work on finishing installing them.  Dad and I had already started.  We used the wood shelf that was already there as a base to set the cabinets on.  That way we knew they would be secure and we would still be able to hang clothes from the rod.  Win, win!

After the cabinets were installed, Chad added the doors.

We added trim to clean up the edges and caulked along the edges and bottom to give it a nice, clean look.

The cabinets were installed and created a ton of hidden storage!

We found eight oil rubbed bronze knobs from our furniture stash to add to each cabinet door.  Free knobs.  Score!

Take a look back at the BEFORE laundry room:

And the AFTER:

Quite a difference!  It is just what I had in mind.  Thank you Dad for all your help!  Thank you Chad, for agreeing to the project!!

The laundry room looks so different now!  But, we didn't stop there...