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This past Wednesday as I was having lunch with my mom, she mentioned that I need more storage in my house. A few weeks back, I went to a women’s retreat, and my mom stayed with Matt while I was gone. (If you’re new around here, Matt is my husband who has M.S. and needs full-time care.) And anytime my mom is left to her own devices in my house, she’s going to clean, do laundry, put things away, etc. 😀 It’s just what she does, and I’m always thankful for her help.
But she’s right. I need more storage. Of course, I have plans for more storage. I’ve already shared my tentative plan for adding more storage to the breakfast room. Right now, the walls on either side of the entrance to the pantry look like this (and the doors to the pantry have been removed since this picture was taken)…
While I like the color that adds to the room, that’s a lot of space dedicated to decorative stuff when it could be so much more useful to me as storage space since it’s right there between the kitchen and the pantry. So I’d love to add cabinets right there. Of course, the cabinets would actually match the cabinets in the kitchen, and they would look like an extension of my kitchen cabinets, but here’s the general idea.
Even if I just do lower cabinets and leave the upper wall space free for artwork, it would still add quite a bit of useful storage to that space.
Right now, since we don’t have our addition built yet, I don’t really have other spaces where I can add storage. I do have areas where I can optimize storage, though. I have a cabinet in the hallway that is in desperate need of organization.
I got one drawer organized a few month ago, but I still need to do the other drawer and the upper cabinets. The lower cabinet is my cat’s litter box, so that can’t be used for storage.
But as my mom and I were talking, I realized that I had been overlooking a great opportunity for added (closed) storage in the hallway bathroom. If we go way back to when Matt and I bought this house, the hallway bathroom had this closet in the corner, but it was hidden when the bathroom door was open. So in order to access the closet, I had to come into the bathroom, close the bathroom door, and then open the closet.
When I remodeled the bathroom, I changed the configuration completely. I moved and widened the bathroom door, and then added double doors that swing out into the hallway so that this area wouldn’t be covered up by the open door. And then I removed the closet completely, added a lower cabinet on the bottom…
And then added open shelves on the top…
Here’s how that looks from the hallway…
I love open shelves. I think they’re very pretty, they make the room look and feel bigger and more open, and I love any opportunity to add pretty, decorative things to a room. But most of the time, I don’t think that open shelves are practical for storage purposes.
As soon as I’m finished with the studio and the studio bathroom, I’ve been planning on making changes to this bathroom. I’ve already purchased the wallpaper…
I’m pretty excited about it, so don’t rain on my parade. 😀 I do plan to remove the tile accent around the room and bring the wallpaper down to the wainscoting, and I think it’s going to look amazing.
I have other plans, like new sconces (which I already have) and a new mirror (which I’ve already picked out). But I had been undecided on what to do with the open shelf area. From a purely decorative standpoint, what I really wanted to do was to remove everything above the countertop, and then wrap the wallpaper around in that area to balance out the color. And then, once that inset area was wallpapered, I planned to add something like floating shelves. But that would mean completely redoing the boards on the ceiling (which don’t extend past the crown molding) as well as redoing the crown molding.
But from a purely practical standpoint, I think what I need to do is extend the closed storage up to the ceiling, completely doing away with the open shelves altogether. So for now, that’s my plan. I need to think through all of the little details before fully committing to this plan. For example, what the heck do I do with this little sliver of wall?
Right now, with the walls painted a very light and neutral color, that sliver of wall kind of disappears. But when I wallpaper the walls with the dark floral wallpaper, that silver of wall is going to scream for attention if I put wallpaper on it. I think it’ll look silly, but I don’t know what else to do with it to make it look intentional.
So I’m going to think through this plan. I think I like it for the most part, and I definitely like the idea of having more usable closed storage in the house.
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.
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