A Wood-Filled Weekend

With a sequence of events, we need to clear our some more space in our garage. One of the main things that needs to go is a bunch of wood we've saved up over the years from various projects. Before just getting rid of all of it or giving it away, I thought we should try and finish some of our own projects which have been on our to-do lists for years and years now. We accomplished both of these projects this past weekend:

1. A "box" to cover the vent hood pipe that goes into the ceiling in our kitchen. 

In April of 2021, we made the decision to vent our range hood vent outside instead of having a recirculating one. It was one of the better decisions we've ever made for our house because I love it so much. I can cook and vent the smells outside and you can't smell anything after a few hours. I don't regret anything about the project except the person we hired. For the last 1.5 years, we've been staring at a really ugly ceiling patch where the pipe connected into the attic. The pipe is also not centered, but that is secondary to the ugly ceiling.

My husband has mentioned wanting to build a box around it to hide the pipe from the beginning to fix both problems. We were finally able to use some leftover MDF board from previous projects to build a three-sided "box" to place in front of the pipe on top of our cabinets. I had used play-doh a long time ago to trace the edge of the trim against our ceiling so we could cut the appropriate edge to cover there as well. 

After a few coats of paint and primer, we had ourselves a white cabinet box to make our kitchen range hood look centered and neat. 

We will hopefully add some trim around the top of the box to match the traditional style of our kitchen as right now it looks too clean and modern. But for now, this box fixed our main issues. Total cost* of this project: $0

2. Utilizing the other half of our second blind corner cabinet.

For my birthday in 2020, I bought blind corner shelf pull-outs and had them installed. To this day I still love using them and they have been super helpful. We have one other blind corner cabinet but the same pull-outs would not work in the other cabinet because it was a smaller cabinet. 

However, this cabinet had space behind it we could use.

The open cabinet is the one with the blind corner.
We've never been able to fully utilize that space. 

This is the backside of the cabinet which allows us to
make a cut to use the blind corner.

We had talked about cutting a hole from behind and adding another door to create another cabinet in our kitchen essentially. This project never came to fruition because I wasn't convinced we had a way to cut open the cabinet to make a clean rectangular opening. This past weekend on Friday morning, I asked my husband again if we could do this project. I was also more convinced to want to do it as a way to use up some of the wood we had stored before we got rid of it all. 

By Friday evening, after the kids went to bed, we got right to work. It took us the entire evening to get the hole measured, prepped, and cut, but we did it.

Really clean cut with a multi-tool he purchased last year.
I have no problem with spending money when it can earn its value.

The next day, my husband spent the whole afternoon making drawer boxes for me. That evening, we had one installed with the sliding tracks. It took much more time than we anticipated because the drawer slides were nearly impossible to separate. We looked up Youtube Videos from different people with three different methods on how to remove them. After a lot of pulling, tugging, and frustrated grunts, we were able to separate the slides and have them installed on their respective halves. 

On Sunday afternoon, my husband finished making the cabinet door completely from scratch! We used an old piece of plywood originally from the house we had saved from a previous renovation. We added some trim to fit with the style of the rest of our house. I primed and painted Sunday evening and by Monday morning, everything was installed and complete. 

Comparable pull out shelves like this would cost $100+ each...(yes, we've looked into it.)

Yes, I've already filled them up. Will need to reorganize the
pantry now that I have more space. 

The secret passageway has a proper entrance! 

Total cost* of this project: $30.90 

I'm really pleased with the way this project turned out. I know we waited years before turning this cabinet into a reality, but now that it's completed, it's really exciting to add another 4 cubic feet of storage space!

*Cost refers to new dollars spent. All other materials we had leftover from previous projects.

Storage 101: Master the Closet

This is the last part in my Storage 101 series. You can catch up on the previous parts here: Intro 1 2 3 

At the end of 2020, we began organizing our master closet and we finished everything in January 2021. It was a spur of the moment project which had been in the works for a few years behind the scenes.

When we bought this house almost six years ago, I really liked the master closet. It was large, spacious, and had shelves and rods to hang and fold clothes. It never came up as something needing to be redone because its functionality was okay.

But there came a point where okay was not good enough.

I began to realize I wanted more drawer space instead of hanging space. In January of 2019, I found a drawer shelf unit secondhand and went to go pick it up. My daughter was nine months old at the time and it was a brutally cold day. To my lack of preparation, the shelf did not fit easily into my car, and although it did fit when we switched the car seat to the other side, I could not lock the car seat back in place and safely or legally drive home. So the kind husband offered to load up the shelf in his pickup truck and drive it home for me. The drive wasn't far as they only lived five minutes down the road, but he didn't have to do any of this.

Kind people exist. You just have to meet them.

I bought new drawers compatible with the shelving unit and set it up in my side of the closet. I used this set up for almost two years before finally realizing it wasn't working anymore. Clothes would sit on top of the drawers and pile up into a stack. The drawers themselves were not enough space for me to easily store and remove the items, and the overall look was very sloppy. 

One evening last December as we were going through the motions to wind down for the evening, we landed on the topic of redoing our closet again. I asked my husband about constructing a drawer unit the way I wanted and we talked about the price of wood and supplies. This led to a quick google search to see if I could find something pre-made and adapt it to my liking. This google search ended up being a rabbit trail which led us to design our custom closet using Elfa from The Container Store. 

We had perused the Elfa collection years before. One evening for fun about five years ago, we were at The Container Store looking at their custom closet solutions. At the time, I was thinking about getting a shoe organizer. The Container Store had these beautiful gliding shoe racks which actually held a good number of shoes. We got a small design drafted up, but that was the end of it.

This time as I thought about installing some new drawers in the closet, we decided to redo our entire closet so it could be almost completely custom. Translation: Hubby saw how good my side looked and he wanted his side to look that good too. In order to do this, we had to remove three closet rods, retexture the wall to match, and paint. It sounds easy on paper, but it was actually a two-day process because we needed to wait for everything to dry properly. I also ended up redoing the wall texture twice because the first time did not match as well as I wanted it to. 

Then we began installation. The Elfa system is designed to be very DIY-friendly. First, we installed the top tracks. We measured and had them cut so every single screw would hit a wall stud for the most secure installation. It is a few extra steps, but I believe it's worth it considering these are going to hold up to 100+ pounds depending on how much clothing you're storing. Then we hung the hanging standards and used brackets to install gliding drawers, gliding shoe racks, and shelves. It was a lot of fun. Was it a lot of work and did it take a few tries to get it the way I wanted? Yes, it absolutely did. But I found the work very therapeutic and exhilarating from my normal SAHM and working part-time duties.

I'm not going to lie. After we finished the closet, there were a few times when I would purposely go to the closet, sit in it, and admire our work. 

Wifey's Drawers

Wifey's Hanging + Shoes

Hubby's Hanging + Drawers. The picture is deceiving. Our halves are almost equal.

Wifey's Long Hanging

That is all my clothes I own and wear in our closet. Do I own a lot, less than average, or a normal amount? I've always wondered because I never thought I owned a lot. But once I realized how much storage I needed to store it all, it made me start to wonder if I actually have a lot of clothes...or just normal amounts. 🤷🏻‍♀️

This was not an inexpensive makeover of our closet. However, I was also able to reuse some of the old storage solutions in our kids' closets. The shoeboxes that used to hold our shoes are now in my son's room holding his shoes. 

I was able to fit 3-4 pairs of shoes in each box and labeled them by putting
a scratch piece of paper under the lid as a simple DIY label. 

I was also able to repurpose the shelf and drawers I originally had in my son's closet to hold his clothing in larger sizes. My daughter already had one of these shelves because hers is one I inherited from a friend back in college for my apartment. 

This is the original drawer unit I purchased second hand
being repurposed in my son's closet. There was never anything wrong with it.
'I just realized I was exploding each bin with clothes and needed more space.

I'm not one to spend a lot of money, and especially not spending money on things to hold my things, but this was completely worth it. Even now, as I finish this blog, I'm getting excited all over again for how functional and aesthetic this closet makeover is. Good things are worth the cost. Thanks for reading. 🙂

Storage 101: Drawer Tetris

This is part 3 in my organization series Storage 101. If this is your first time reading, you can catch up on the other parts here: 1 2 

We organized drawers in two areas of our house: the kitchen and our master bathroom. 

As mentioned in a the previous blog of this series, my goal was never to have Instagram-worthy photos of beautifully color-coordinated drawers with neatly organized items. I don't believe that is real life. Sometimes, by coincidence, it happens in small quantities. My goal is to create an organized space that is easy to use where none of the items catch when opening or closing the drawer. 

We also did not organize every single drawer in either of these spaces. That was never the goal either. I wanted to organize the drawers which were used the most and with which I was most dissatisfied. This being said, we still have drawers full of random "stuff." I don't have a problem with that because those drawers are not used as frequently and therefore, do not dissatisfy me nearly as much. 

So here's what we did: 

Kitchen:

We organized four drawers in our kitchen. Two of the drawers are for kitchen utensils. One is for eating utensils and the other is for prepping and cooking utensils. The other two drawers are for office supplies. 

Once again, one of the first things I did was measure. I measured drawers. I measured utensils. I measured measuring tapes. There was a lot of measuring. One of the things that organizing companies can do is they buy all sorts of storage sizes and see what works best with the space during the actual install. I...don't exactly have this luxury, so I have to do a lot of pre-work beforehand or risk making multiple trips to the store which is not something I can afford to do right now. 

Then I played around with the storage organizers and looked at what items fit best in each container and basically played tetris. Our original utensil organizer moved to our bathroom and became a drawer organizer there when we moved to the house. We bought a larger utensil organizer for the house. With this reorganization, the larger utensil organizer became the kitchen gadget utensil organizer and the original utensil organizer came back to the kitchen and was reinstated as the utensil organizer.

This utensil organizer was my bathroom drawer organizer for a while
until it came back as the utensil organizer

The utensil holder we bought for the house when we moved in
has now become the gadget utensil drawer.

That spool of string is....22-24 years old. That pencil box is also about 25 years old.
My NASA ruler is at least 20 years old. Who says old stuff has to be replaced?

In our office supply drawer, I am still using small cardboard boxes as drawer organizers because they don't all have to be fancy or match if you don't want them to or can't afford it. The smaller purple one is one half of an old card box. I find that size and depth is great for organizing knickknacks.

Bathroom: 

This drawer was originally organized
using the utensil organizer. I think it looks
much better this way. 

The bathroom was more or less the same process. My original drawer which used the utensil organizer was replaced with rectangular organizers of various sizes. I was able to organize a second drawer as well which used to have no organization and has now turned into my favorite bathroom drawer. One advantage to using smaller containers rather than putting lots of items in a larger container is the items stay put rather than slosh around as you open and close the drawer.

It’s so fulfilling to be able to open a drawer, get exactly what you need, and close it again without displacing the other contents by laws of physics. 

If bathroom drawers had favorites,
this would be mine.

If Clea and Joanna saw the way I organized my nail polish, they’d probably cringe and die a little on the inside. But here’s why I chose to do it this way:

1. It saves space  

2. I don’t have that many so I know all my colors by the tops of the bottles.

They would probably recommend storing them in a way where you can view the bottle from the front instead of from the top. Aesthetically, it looks better, and you can create their quintessential color-coordinated look. However, that wasn’t conducive to my space because I wanted efficient, convenient storage. As mentioned before, this works for me because I only have 13 bottles of nail polish. 

I bought these containers from Amazon and reused some other ones in various drawers because that was the cheapest way to do it. However, buying from Amazon always involves a bit of risk because you can’t see what the actual product is like until it arrives at your house. And although they have a pretty good return policy, it is time consuming and does involve dropping it off and waiting for your refund. 

One thing I discovered is the containers I bought are not straight down the sides. They taper inwards so the bottom dimensions are smaller than the top dimensions. This made storing some things slightly frustrating because despite measuring, I didn’t account for tapering. 

These are the small details on why one container can cost $1 a unit and the very same size and material will cost you $6 a unit elsewhere. Some of the drawer organizers I bought came with metal feet which gave the container a more weighted, sturdy feel. Others felt like I could snap them in half if I handled them improperly. 

All containers are not created equal. Shop smart. 

Stay tuned for next time: The Master Closet

Storage 101: The Catalyst

Spending an increased number of hours at home this last year made me realize how dissatisfied I was with a lot of our storage and organization solutions. We've made do for the last 5.5 years in our house, but this past year was a big breaking point for us because so much of our time was spent inside at home, so it unkindly revealed parts of our storage that were not working. 

Now to understand me, you have to realize, I grew up "wrong" in a way when it came to storage and organization. My mentality up until about....last year was paying for bins, drawers, containers to store your stuff was "wasted" money. It was always seen as more useful to spend the money on actual items of use instead of something to organize the items. Sure, we bought shelves and drawers to organize, but that was where it ended: shelves and drawers. What we needed to learn was how to organize the actual shelf or drawer.

Which leads me to two of the big names in storage and organization: Marie Kondo and The Home Edit.

In 2019, we watched Marie Kondo's series on Netflix Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. It was entertaining to watch and resulted in us refolding all of our T-shirts to stand up. That didn't last and my t-shirts reverted back to the old way I'd been folding them for the last 15 years. In 2020, we watched The Home Edit. I was again inspired to reorganize after watching their techniques. My home reorganization has been a blend of both techniques and mentalities. 

Fun fact: Marie teaches her kids how to be tidy and keep things neat. I aspire to do that, too.

What I took from Marie Kondo:

- Sparking joy: There's a lot to be said about this mentality. I'm not going to get into the spiritual details she includes in her cleaning mantra as I don't agree with them entirely. However, I do agree that there is a sense of joy that comes from a well-organized space. Clean lines and organized containers which are visually appealing bring a sense of satisfaction and enjoyment when the contents are used. 

What I did not take from Marie Kondo:

- A lot of her folding methods to organizing clothes/sheets/towels involve folding on a flat surface. This is hardly possible for me because I don't have a flat surface to fold my clothes. Half the time, I'm folding laundry while my kids are playing. This means I have whatever sofa space is not covered by toys and books. I don't fold clothes on the floor because 110% of the time my floor is not clean enough for me to want to fold clean laundry on it. Therefore, I will pretty much never use her folding methods. Even as a short person, I fold everything standing up.  

I never understood how "house goals" could be a thing until I watched this series. 

What I took from The Home Edit:

- Using clear storage bins you can see through is extremely valuable despite the cost. The mantra "out of sight out of mind" is very true. We do not think about the things we cannot see and those are the items most often overlooked when it comes to storage. Think about your pantry or food storage. Chances are, the things you can't see are the items which expire and go bad. 

- Organization has to suit the daily needs. Frequented items need to be easily accessible. Just because you have 50 cubic feet of pantry space does not mean you can use the whole space because nothing located in the back will be easily accessible if you stack the front all the way up.

What I did not take from The Home Edit:

- Color coding items. They organized books and board games by color. This does not speak to me at all as a person. Does it look cool? Yes, yes it does. Is it functional for what I want when I organize books or board games? No, sorry.

- Labeling: I don’t label my bins. Being clear already, I can see what’s inside and know what the intended category was when I created it. Even if it’s not clear, I can tell what was intended to go into it to begin with. 

Why We Did It:

1. Being inside all the time meant little bits of disorganization and mess left us very unsatisfied and annoyed.

2. It was the cheaper option to maximizing space. We're not moving anytime soon. We're not undertaking any remodeling additions or layout changes.

3. We have the means to. I know not everyone does, and believe me, we've been there and done that when we reused old boxes and cardboard containers to create space dividers and organizers. I actually still do in small amounts. There's nothing wrong with creating DIY organizers. Does it look as nice? No, it doesn't. Does it save a lot of money? Yes. If that's where you are in your life stage, there's nothing wrong with organizing with what you have. 

The Spaces we Organized:

- Kitchen Cabinets

- Pantry

- Master Bathroom Drawers

- Master Closet

- Hall Bathroom Drawers

Follow along as I unpack the spaces we organized and how we did it. 

Part 1: Blind Corners