Half Bath

This was a bit of a milestone over at grandma's. We almost demoed this when we renovated the kitchen. Since that project was all we could handle, we held off. So for about a year and a half this bathroom was affectionately called the men's room. The color scheme was a bit unique, and it had a certain gas station bathroom feel to it.




I'll spare you the details, but it's good we had a full bathroom as we started this in November and though there are a couple of details to finish (there always are!), we really didn't finish until the end of Jan.

Here's some 'during' pics:




...now with some paint and beadboard:


And finally, some of the finished product:
(note the retro black and white hex floor tile)

Guest bed closet

When we moved in to grandma's house, one of the first projects was to overhaul the closet in our bedroom. The wall plaster and paint was chipping, and the layout wasn't ideal (only upside was the fact that it was a little deeper than some closets you might find in a 150 year old house.) Making a bit of lemonade here, we were able to work with it by putting a set of shelves on the side and 2 sets of racks in the main part of the closet. It's no McMansion walk-in closet, but it works for us.

The guest bed closet, however, was a pretty low priority at that time. Sometime between Thanksgiving and New Years, we finally got around to improving the guest bed closet. Its dimensions were virtually identical to our closet, so the plan was duplicated here.

Anyway, here's what she looks like:
Before:

After:

The broom closet

This project was in process the last time we updated the blog (aug/sept timeframe). Between the living room and the kitchen theres about 2 feet of hallway - well I'm not sure if you can call it a hallway, but at any rate its this 2 foot wide no mans land. On either side we have AC ductwork running upstairs (one for supply, one for return). When we bought the house, the right side of this hall was framed with a louvred door acting as a broom closet. To the left, they sealed it up with drywall. During kitchen renovations, curiosity got the best of me and that drywall came down, revealing an unused space (complete with requisite cracking/peeling plaster). At the time, we had bigger fish to fry so this area was left as is. Eventually this area's time would come, and that time was now (well, really that time was in august, but you get the idea).

When the kitchen work was done, I did make sure that there was electrical supplied to this area to support an outlet or a light somewhere down the line. With that available, we decided to redo the broom closet and then build a bookcase in the dead space on the left. Then one can recessed light on the top (handy to find the book(s) we'll want to refer to. Since we have some nice ikea bookcases about 3 feet away in the living room, we really didn't need a bookcase for more fiction/non-fiction works. Rather, this baby is just for our cookbook collection.

Once we figured out how to frame out the AC ducts, it was really a matter of hanging drywall, mudding said drywall, painting, and finally installation of door and bookcase. Since this area is on the small side, its hard to get good pics. And not surprisingly we never took pictures of how this area looked when we bought it. But I think you get the idea:

Bookcase before (this is almost how it looked for months and months:
And after framing out the back wall, hanging drywall, and some more of the Benji Moore Fusion paint we love in the kitchen, to tie the two areas together:
Now its ready for the bookcase and cookbooks:
And on the other side, the broomcloset.
Before (thats it, way back when the kitchen was in process):
Gutted:
...and here's the 'after', new walls and a new, smaller door: