First, I want to start this post with a BIG THANK YOU!   All of your wonderful comments really helped me make it through the last two weeks.  Also that I felt totally understood, validated and loved ( if you are a busy mother you must go read these comments!)!  Thank you!  It has been an interesting week, I have been sicker than a dog with strep throat, which meant that we even had to cancel our plans for Thanksgiving…).  But I think I am narrowing down the things that we can and cannot do at this time in our lives.   AND getting more comfortable with those realities!  So, I have to say it again THANK you!  I may try to talk more about that in a few days (or realistically I shouldn’t set a date) but at the moment I am getting super excited for Christmas (aren’t you!) so I wanted to talk about it.

This year is the first year that Etta really gets the idea of Christmas.  She is All about Christmas trees… (don’t ask if we already have ours up… cuz the answer would have to be yes- since mid November… but it has taken me two weeks to get any ornaments on it at all, so if I had waited, we might never had gotten to it before the big day!)

Anyway, I wanted to talk about a project that we started back in April and moved very slowly along wwith, and then in July when our big huge secret project got started, this one stopped entirely.  Let me explain I bit first.

In our very unfinished family room, there is a walk in closet.  It is approximately 5′ by 5′.   Let’s be honest, that is sorta awesome, a walk in closet with no actual purpose?!  Heck yea!  It was full of shelves so when we moved in it became our “library”!  But then if you remember, we remodeled our living room.   We added built in bookcases, so I thought, “Why don’t we put books in our book cases”, I know, it’s never been done right?  So, we moved about 2 tons of book back downstairs, which I still haven’t staged, since it ended up being too many books, but we had to finish the next project to finish that project… which explains that always unfinished project cycle in our house… Then, I stopped liking the black paint in the back of the shelves… but that is a different story.

Back to the closet.  After moving out all the books, the closet still had some randoms like games and books on cd, which we worked out a new space for in our built in storage project here.  But until then had stacks of c-r-a-p  on every elevated surface of our family room for about 3 months… it seems that my tolerance for chaos during projects is too high.

But the other secret reason I had for clearing out this closet was all the awesome closet rooms I had been seeing… I wanted to make something more out of this space than just storage.  And then I realized “Well, Texas is HOT in the summer and FREEZING in the winter, so why not make a playhouse!”   Yea  a playhouse!  And since Justin and I are still kids at heart, we totally went crazy designing this space.  Okay, well, I guess you must blame the design on me, but Justin loves to do the work, so it is his fault for being so good at making my plans come true, and letting them get out of control (thanks Honey!)

So our goal is to try and finish this by Christmas with no extra cash.  (including a little kitchen)  One of the major goals of this little project is to use what we have- scraps, left over from other projects!  We have been getting very creative!  And I think it is going to be awesome!

Here are the plans, keep in mind that these have changed quite a bit, but you kinda get the idea of what we want to try!

Two story play house plans!  YEA!

I know it is all over the place… but I couldn’t stop myself from using every cute kid idea I have ever seen or wanted as a child, and I was building forts up until I was about 13, so I love me a good fort… I know I was a total geek!  Oh well, at least I had fun!

Let the demo begin!  (back in April… I didn’t realize how long ago we started this! FYI) Before we had our elliptical and recumbent bike up here.  But, we sold the bike and moved the elliptical to our office.  We used to be able to keep Etta out with this gate, but times and climbing abilities have changed.  So it was a good thing to move out of our family space.

This is the door to the closet we are discussing.

A view of some of our books… I have a thing for books.

Realizing a little too late, that we don’t have quite enough room in the book cases, but I just shoved them in any way I could get them in there!

Here is one of the cutest little helpers you could ask for!  Luckily the other little sweetheart was being a great napper!

The almost empty closet.

You can see the shelf support,  down the corner of the shelves, I started by removing that.  At first I just planned on removing the bottom two shelves, but once I was into it,  I just went for it.  Of course, Justin was at work, so I didn’t get any pictures of the demo or get in trouble for starting yet another project… ha ha!

Once everything was out, I drew all over the walls figuring out what I wanted.  And where I wanted it… I used a red permanent marker…big mistake!  I keeps bleeding through my paint, so I need to go buy a blocker paint.

The next step was getting some holes cut out for a window.  But first we ran to the Habitat restore to find a little louvered shade that we can size to the window.

Okay, it is 10:30 and I am needing some rest!    I am going to try to do little updates on this project as they happen, so we will see how that works!

What do you think of the plans?

Featured image source.

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