Heather's Crazy Construction at Christmas

Disclaimer: Don't try this at home

If you like everything perfect at Christmas time, all the holly glistening, and your house full of jolly singing and cocoa sipping, and wrapping presents:

Then don't do construction, painting, and rearranging furniture and 2 rooms around in 4 days before Christmas.

It results from this: (where's the cheerful Christmas setting?) And an ugly old 15 year beat up crappy *couch used to sit on the right of the photo at the wall that I threw out (and cheered with joy when the dump truck finally hauled it away on trash and bulk day)

And this. Getting hives yet? And with all projects, it turns into several BEGATS. (Starting a project such as painting a simple wall will begat in finding a hole in the wall to be repaired, that begats into fixing some electric work, then begats into some construction work, that begats into fixing/painting or buying furniture that will take place at the newly painted wall.....)

Oh, and the hubs will start tearing out and re-doing your pantry at the same time:

Then this. ALL the walls were repainted. All this resulted in 3 bags of decrapification:

Oh yeah, I have a TINY bit of Christmas stuff decorated, but you can barely see it with vast amounts of stuff on the kitchen table that resulted in 3 days of ordering in pizza:

After a lot of frustration, elbow grease, grunting, heaving, pushing, cursing, crying and countless trips to Ace and Home Depot: I finally got this:

A room with so much wasted space and a couch I hated turned into this MPR. Everyone is in the same room doing various sorts of things, and the kitchen is right across from it. Now I won't be alone cooking and cleaning and we are all together doing various stuff. Mostly creative stuff in this new MPR. And amazing enough the square footage of usuable space is exactly the same as before even though I have more stuff in this room.

Left of photo: Hubs built me a 9 1/2 feet long workstation that you can see on the left that has an office and craft area. Three people can sit at this desk, awesome! I am working on a canvas dropcloth table skirt to hide all the rough looking areas under the workstation, and it stores my sewing machine and probably more food storage eventually.

Back wall: Expedit bookcase on the left has all my craft/scrap/office supplies. The center is the armoire housing all my preschool supplies. The Expedit bookcase on the right is all the preschool baskets of activities for centers, plus books.

Right side of the photo: The 100 year old piano is finally finished! It took Ryan a year to work on getting the nasty 70's varnish and laquered built up grime off (that was put hastily over the original finish from 1910 in about 1969). We finally had a local piano guy finish it up, stain it, and tune the piano. It is now back to its original state and sound. This piano is a Richmond upright 1910 that Ryan's grandmother bought off the floor in a local mall in 1959 in SLC. It got hauled around in different homes and treated pretty badly over the years. Then it was in my husband's mothers home for about 23 years getting beat up by some of the grandkids. Now it sits in my home and my daughter practices her piano lessons on it. We are very proud of this new addition to our home.

So this wonderful MPR is a result of my son wanting his own room for Christmas. I gave up my office/craft room determined to do something better with the living room downstairs. The original office was becoming a meeting place for everyone, because everyone wants to be doing something creative in the crafts or busy doing something on the computer, or talking to someone who is doing something on the computer etc etc. So we had 6 people and 2 dogs in a tiny office/craft room, never mind the rest of the big house available to spread out!! It was driving me insane!

And I still have to post pics of Cade's new room that used to be the office. The pantry: not posting. Just added more wood shelves, and shelves on the side. Nothing too spectacular except I can have a place for  food storage.

*More on the couch as noted above in this post: I threw out this crappy couch THREE times over the years. Each time my oldest son and husband hauled it back into the house. There's something about never messing with a man's dogs, guns, trucks, the TV remote and their beloved couches.