Sunday, May 27, 2012

My First Day of Freeedom

Doesn't feel all that free.

The clock went off at 5a. for J to get up, but I woke up thinking, "I gotta get up, I got to..." No, wait, I don't have to get up. Okay, back to sleep.
About 7:30 I jerked awake thinking I was late. Not late for anything, go back to sleep.
Woke up again at 10:30, achy all over, again thinking, "Get up, I've got to get that done."  Don't know what I thought I had to get done, though.

I got up and put some dishes in the washer and a load of laundry, and went and laid back down with my book. Because, you know, I'm free to do whatever I want, whenever I want now, and if I want to lay in bed with a book on a Sunday after a very stressful week and read, hey, why not.
Because I kept feeling this strange urgency that I needed to get up and do something. Something needed to be done.

Hopefully it's just holdovers from this past week, and not actually something I'm forgetting to do!

Anyway. Remember when I came up with the idea of a Mudroom and I said - and I quote - "With J busy re-working the back porch, I figured Ryan and me could build something like that. It's basically mostly plywood screwed together." ?

Yeah....No.

I started out with the idea of just replacing the floor, and then do the mudroom thing later, but that's not how it worked out. Once we got started, we just kept on going.

We originally built this little room inside the back corner of the carport to be a laundyroom/pantry, but then later we changed the floorplan again and made this room the entrance to the kitchen from the carport, which lost my pantry space. So when we decided to add the large back porch on the back, instead of going out from this room onto porch, we added a larger laundryroom with pantry space, and the porch off of that.



Almost everything we used to build the mudroom thing is re-used or left-over from other projects stuff. Some of the plywood was given to J by a guy he knows, some plywood and a lot of the trim was left-over from the back porch project. The 1970's pecan paneling came out of our livingroom.  We only had to buy a few pieces of trim, and baseboard trim for around the rest of the room which hadn't been completed before, the last time we worked on the room. Cost less than $25.00 to this point, including the left-over flooring.


I had some Kilz left from painting the livingroom in December so me and Ryan primered it, then I went to Home Depot and bought a gallon of white, hi-gloss to paint it, cost about $30.00.

 For the remainder of the room, my parents have a habit of buying the $5.00 gallons of "Oops" paint about every time they go into Home Depot (which is often. With 5 - now 6 - homes, they do a lot of painting. And fixing up). Anyway, I ended up with a gallon of "Elusive Blue" she'd brought to the house at some point in the past. It really looks white, but there's just the barest, barely hint of blue to it.  The room being inside the carport and staying mostly in shadow, it looked "Elusive Blue" before it was "Elusive Blue" anyway. I (literally) didn't care if it was pink at that point - it was free.

Reminder of the before:


After:
I didn't get finished painting the underneath and some of the door trims, but Mom was impressed with what we'd done.


I plan to hang a row of vertical hooks on the space to the right, left of the door for J to hang his ballcaps on. That actually is what started me on this whole idea. He has several caps he wears with different outfits or to different places, and he keeps them stacked on a kitchen counter beside the fridge, which I can't stand.
I could have done that before, without having built a whole new deal, but what fun would that have been? haha.

As for the baskets up top, I'm thinking I want something bright red, but not the modern kind of storage cubes, which would probably look okay, but I'm kindly trying to stick with a vintage farmhouse type theme. I'm meditating on painting wicker baskets red, or maybe building some sort of box or small crate out of scrap wood and painting them red.
I had threatened to paint the insides of the 'lockers' red to match the sweetheart cabinet, but that might be just a tad too much, lol.

4 comments:

Katie said...

Wow, it looks great!! Nice use of the left over wood!

Happy first day of freedom! :)

Melissa said...

Thanks! I love re-using stuff!

As for my day, I guess it's going to take some time to change my 20+ year life patterns. Today felt like any other day. I even, for a moment, had an icky feeling when I realized earlier that tomorrow is Monday. I keep having to remind myself there are no more Mondays for me!

Amber said...

I LOVE IT!! I think red wooden crates would be perfect down below and maybe above you could just do those liner thingys in wicker baskets in some kind of red fabric.

Great job!!!

Melissa said...

Thanks, Amber!

I didn't actually plan on putting anything underneath - maybe a mat of some sort - so they can park their boots and/or muddy/dirty shoes when they come in, instead of wearing them all over the house to take them off in the bedroom, or livingroom, or (new) laundryroom.

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