A Post About Carpentry

We've had some carpentry needs for a while and finally got our projects done this spring, and I love everything so much! What started as a need for a couple of new doors grew, so I'm going to talk about each project individually to show all the great things.

What we first needed were 3 doors:

1) Our bathroom pocket door kept coming off the track and finally stopped working all together - we wanted to replace with a barn door

2) I broke our bedroom door {let's not talk about how}, so we needed to replace it as well, and I thought it would be cool to have it be a stained solid wood door instead of the painted hollow doors we have throughout the house - make the master look a little more unique

3) Brent wanted a sliding barn door to separate the kitchen from the playroom - ever since we got the piano he's been eager to block off the sound over there! {grin} We also thought this would be a great thing to have as the kids get older and louder and had more friends over.

We got a quote for just the barn doors from a local company, and it was INSANE. Talking to a friend who had just built a house and had custom cabinetry/doors put in, we found a GREAT local woodworker who could do the doors AND MORE!

This led into us also deciding to:

1) Add some shelving in our laundry room - we've been talking about this for years but hadn't made it a priority

2) Add some additional shelving in our closet to use some wasted space.

SO...with all that chatter, let's look at some pictures! All the *before* pictures come from right after we moved in 6 years ago - it's crazy to see what has changed since then...or what we need to change out {I'm looking at all the rugs with a side-eye FOR SURE}.

CLOSET

I don't have great before pictures, but you can see when you walk in the closet a section {under that small window} where there is an empty space and we wanted to add some functionality.

When we designed the closet, we put in A LOT of space for hanging clothes.

But we didn't think about dresses and didn't have enough shoe space.

The finished product!

More space for shoes! I think I've 17 pairs of shoes over there now.

Plus a hanging section for my dresses, a shelf to stack sweaters,

and we added a space for our dirty clothes hamper. I LOVE IT!

BEDROOM AND BARN DOORS

As I mentioned above, all our doors matched and were very basic.

Although not a normal size, so when we looked into replacing ourselves...we couldn't!

You can also see the pocket door to the half bath right outside our room.

Same style door, just stained and a solid wood door. It's gorgeous!

And here's the new barn door instead of the busted pocket door!

You can see the arch leading from the kitchen into the playroom.

View from the playroom - this room looks COMPLETELY different.

Only thing that is the same is the rug I think!

To quote Brent 'Bye, kids!'

And the view from the playroom with the door open

LAUNDRY ROOM

I don't have a picture of the space above the bench because it was just a blank wall.

We always talked about adding hooks for backpacks or a long shelf...something.

And here's what we have!

Shiplap siding {hooks to be delivered today for hanging coats, backpacks, etc},

cubbies for masks, shoes, brushes, books, homework, whatever,

and some cabinets because you can't ever have enough cabinets, am I right?

One funny tidbit is we don't think the wood stain color looks anything like what we picked, but it's so hard to see how it will look when you are choosing from a small space. We wanted it to be similar to all the dark wood we have but a little lighter. Well, it is basically exactly the same color as all the rest of the wood. It looks great but not quite the difference we wanted, ha.

We picked the bottom color...but don't think that's what we got!

Brent asked me a few days ago what my favorite addition was, and I honestly couldn't answer him. I love it all! What's crazy to me is everything we did cost less than the original quote we got for just the 2 barn doors! It's also something I knew but didn't quite believe that your house is never truly done - we have a long list of projects that will keep us busy for several years...and that list never stops!