A shot from the entrance to the room. The wooden bowl on top of the armoire is actually an old salad bowl that is cracked, but too beautiful to part with. Now it holds my socks!

Another angle from the entrance.

This shows the door that will eventually lead into the main floor laundry room. A barn door is still in the planning stages. You might notice the picture with the pear sitting on its side. Still have to pick-up a photo of the kids to replace the current picture in the frame.

Upcycled dining room chandelier and bench storage with newly upholstered seat. I also love the new mirror I picked up at Jysk for around $50.

Scrapbooking area

Scrapbooking area

My embellishment organizer was originally navy blue and purchased from Canadian Tire. It’s intended to store nails and screws, but works perfectly for scrapbooking.

Tim just nailed 4 scrap pieces of beadboard together to make me this garbage. It doesn’t actually have a bottom, but the bag fits over it perfectly, so it’s not really necessary.

I love the print on this chair and with the arms removed it is so much more functional.

The same friend that passed on the white bench also gave me this awesome old projector case. She found it curb side on “free day”. It makes a great little storage case and a fabulous shelf for a few of my favourite books.

This wardrobe was a treasure we rescued years ago from a friend that was going to trash it. We removed the warped wood inserts and replaced them with chicken wire and painted it out white. Still one of my favourite pieces of furniture. Now home to almost my entire wardrobe!

My newly organized clothes.

It is a bit hard to see the colour, but it goes beautifully with the new wall colour.

The room is done… at least for now! I am so excited about this space. I think it might be my favourite room in the house. It is so “clean” and bright, and the best part …. it’s all mine! I love how the afternoon sun saturates the entire room with natural light. It is roomy, clutter free and oh so pretty!

Although this was nothing more than a spare room make-over, it ended up being quite a big project. Before I could even start, we had to dismantle the old piano that I had hoped to one day upcycle. (I discovered that the amount of work involved was not worth the blood, sweat and tears it would take to transform it.) From there, we proceeded to empty the room and prep the walls for paint. We primed and painted the walls and gave the trim a fresh coat of paint. The most time consuming aspects of the project actually involved the major purge of my clothes and scrapbooking supplies. This accounted for at least 25 hours of sorting and organizing. It was a huge undertaking, but felt amazing when I finally accomplished my goal.

It seemed there were oodles of mini projects required in order to achieve the desired finished look. In addition to painting the walls and trim, we spray painted my embellishment organizer, cut, stained and mounted the shelves, changed the door swing, reupholster the office chair, and painted and upholstered the bench top. The final touches included hanging the pictures and a new mirror and building and painting a bead board garbage container. We intend to install a barn door that will be used to close off the new main floor laundry (once we’ve moved it up from the basement). With future plans to add a sliding door, we also deemed it necessary to remove the old light switch (for the old scrapbooking room/new laundry room) from outside the room to inside the room. If we hadn’t done this, the switch would end up being covered by the sliding door. After an endless list of little projects, I think the room looks great!

To truly appreciate the transformation, I thought you might need a reminder of how the old room looked in its prior life as “family dumping ground”.

Yes, this is pretty much how it looked. You can see my pile of mending on top of the sewing machine that is sitting on one of those tiny little kids play tables. The next picture actually shows the little black stool I would sit on to sew ~ are you kidding me? I didn’t realize how ridiculous this was until just now.

Don’t kid yourself, the room never looked this tidy. This is post piano destruction and removal!!

So ugly with the original brown walls.

Here are a few shots of how my old scrapbooking room looked. Everything was miss matched, the space was cramped and it was always a mess because the storage was inadequate.

Scrap paper storage system.

Navy blue screw/nail cabinet used to store my knick knacks.