A mudroom! This space is one of my favorite places in our farmhouse. I’ve always wanted a mudroom. I grew up in a small apartment and never lived in a house until we bought the one in NJ that we left last year. Years of looking at design magazines, and my year as an interior design student in college, just left me with this picture in my head of what domestic living should look like. And one of those pictures is having a happy, functional space for the mess of everyday life. Not to hide it away, but to give it its own room to kind of revel in the mess of family life, without destroying the rest of the house. This is also the height of privilege, having an entire room in a home that’s basically for dirty shoes, but as a kid with limited privacy and space it’s just something I dreamed of. And here’s the before and after for ours.
When the new year rolled around I got my usual urge to reorganize, but this year I really, really reorganized. We replaced the 9-year-old bedroom carpet in my studio with some office carpet that wears well, I completely moved furniture around, and I threw out…quite a lot. I wanted the space to feel more open, and even though I have a LOT of craft supplies…I wanted it to feel as contained as possible.
So, I have gotten my hands on some cool stuff lately. Like these t-shirts from Totally Good Time. (I also have a Gilmore Girls shirt, but I’m saving it for the Netflix premiere on Black Friday).
I spent New Year’s Week completely redoing my studio. I threw out bags and bags of stuff, handily carried downstairs by Adam and my visiting brother-in-law Thomas. I moved furniture. I made several trips to Michaels to take advantage of their 50% off sale on craft storage. I’m really not kidding, this was my cart on one trip:
So my studio has been a disaster since what feels like the dawn of time. Some of this is because I’m kind of a craft hoarder. Some of it is because I have an active crawler who lives for destruction.
But whatever the reason, something had to be done. Things needed to be streamlined, and stuff needed to be moved higher. We’d pretty much baby-proofed the rest of the house, but I’d had this delusional hope that since H hadn’t noticed all the good stuff on my studio shelves yet she never would.
This is obviously not how the universe works.
One of the most satisfying projects I did around the house this summer was cleaning out our laundry room closet. This closet was a serious disaster. See?
I guess I have this sort of one-closet-a-year thing, last year I overhauled the pantry (and it’s still in pretty good shape). But this one was turning into a total menace. When you opened the door things would fall on you. Adam did this huge wiring project in July, and he had to get into this closet a lot. Swearing and the stubbing of body parts ensued.
I have this giant list of summer To Dos. These are all the projects I’ve wanted to do for ages, but I haven’t had the time. Today was the first day of summer break that didn’t involve party planning, and I jumped into this list feet first. I organized the garage, the coat closet, and the pantry. I also painted over some patched holes in one of the bedrooms, and I sorted a big pile of mail. Now I’m completely exhausted, so here are some before and after pics of the pantry to ooh and aah at.