Rehabbing

Where have I been all week, you ask?  Ok, maybe you didn’t ask (actually Mare Mare asked in her blog, but ironically, that was after I had started this post!), so I’m going to tell you anyway.  My husband and I have embarked on our first major self-done home improvement project!  We are now almost finished, and I think it’s safe to say that it went well!

We had a spare room on the first floor that we made into a craft room.  We put a bunch of arts and crafts in there for the kids, along with a big table.  They used it a lot, almost every day, but they would never clean up after themselves.  So, it became a storage room; which really means a place to toss junk and clutter.  Complicating the problem was the fact that our elderly dog was having accidents in there, so it smelled so bad no one even wanted to go in there.  So we ripped out the carpet, got on our hands and knees to pull out the nails the carpet left behind, scrubbed the floor, primed it and painted it.  Viola!  No more stench!  It was a lot of hard work, but it was fun, and now we have a brand new room for our family!  What to do with the new room?  We began with the idea that it was going to be a playroom for the kids, but then we realized that they don’t really need a play room – all their toys fit in their bedrooms or in the living room.  Plus, after all that work, we kind of want the room to ourselves.

So now the idea is to reward ourselves by repo-ing the room (we did save ourselves over $700 by avoiding the carpet installation!), and we’re thinking we’re going to make it a theater room.  We got some theater chairs last week on clearance from  our Kmart going out of business, and my husband is going to see about getting a projector and screen.  I think we’ll also have room for a table and our storage bins so the kids can still have their place for crafts and homework.  And, the room has a huge closet – so the plan is to move our famous game closet over to that room since our game collecting addiction has outgrown its current home.  All this means more work ahead, of course, but nothing can be as bad as crawling around on our hands and knees on the cruddy old floor – everything from here on out is the fun part!  Before and after: