April 14th, 2020

Looks like I found my next project!  Hurrah!

Never really noticed what an absolute pile of chaos the utility room has become.  Yikes.  How on earth did this happen?    

It did not start out in life as a utility room, understand.  In it's original incarnation it was a garage. A VERY small garage.  So small in fact, that if it were still a garage neither of our cars would have fit in it anyway.  It's a moot point because by the time we bought the house, someone else had already removed the garage doors and installed double doors.

Not wide enough to drive most cars through but wide enough to move something wider than an average door in and/or out.   And that has turned out to be very handy.  

So now it is a utility room/storage room/HVAC room/Laundry room.  But that isn't how it was when we bought the house.  At that time it was strictly storage. They had loads of built in wooden cabinetry that was so disgustingly filthy. Layer upon layer upon layer of yuck. I am not even certain what it was.  (insert shuddering here)  It also had bugs.  Wood+florida+not clean=bugs.  Sooooo we ripped out all of the old cabinetry, cleaned, debugged and started over.

Another little bit of backtracking, originally the HVAC and the washer/dryer were in the kitchen. When I saw that I was not happy.  It was all squeezed into a small closet. So small in fact that I could only fit between the HVAC and the washer/dryer by stepping sideways between them.  Not Good. To say nothing of the fact that it was taking up valuable space in an already small kitchen.  Tim assured me that all of that could be moved and the closet turned into a pantry.  Colour me Much Happier.

So after we bought the house, the very first project was moving HVAC and washer/dryer to that storage room.  Our contractor had no problem moving the laundry and turning the space left behind into my gorgeous pantry and the HVAC guy, who we already had replacing the old system with a bigger, better, new one was delighted to move it as well.  Elbow room!  Awesome!

Once the kitchen was finally done, Tim and I set about ripping out that nasty old wooden gross stuff.  Once it was all gone, and we had taken about 30 showers apiece to get rid of that creepy ick feeling, we were kind of wowed by how much more space we had.  Because there are always  things that need to be stored.  When we arrived, honestly, it was not a lot.  We had gotten rid of so much stuff before we moved here.  The remainder was mostly Christmas stuff and  a few tools, ordinary things.  

So Tim bought some gorgeous big heavy open shelving and set it up.  We stacked up our rubber maid bins, all of which fit with room to spare and called it good.

But y'know life happens.  We painted nearly every room in this house. Which meant we had to buy paint and rollers and pans and afterwards...store it somewhere.  And then  when we finally completely unpacked we found that there were some things that, while we still needed, we didn't need to use all of the time and it had to go somewhere.  And suitcases..y'know...they take up a lot of closet space so they should probably just go to the utility room too.   And then there are the thing you acquire after you move somewhere new.  Things like beach umbrellas and folding chairs and........

Well you see what's happening here.  Somehow we have accumulated stuff.  And needed easier access to stuff.   And sometimes maybe were a little lazy putting things away. And well, it happens.

So my next project will be bringing order out of chaos.  I am not even certain what is in some of the bins and boxes.  So I will for sure be labeling things better. I'm reasonable sure that some things already have a proper place to be that simply aren't in their proper place.  And I predict that some things will be thrown out or donated.  

The one thing I can promise is:  it will look a heck of a lot better when I'm done.

Oh I do love a new project ;)