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This past Wednesday when I was having dinner with my mom, she mentioned that I needed more storage in my house. A few weeks ago, I went on a women’s retreat and my mom stayed with Matt while I was gone. (If you’re new here, Matt my husband has MS and needs full-time care.) And anytime my mom is left to her own devices at my house, she goes to clean, do laundry, put things away, etc. 😀 It’s just her job, and she I am always grateful for the help.

But she was right. I need more storage. Of course, I have plans for more storage. I’ve already shared my tentative plan for adding more storage to the breakfast room. Currently, the walls on either side of the pantry entrance look like this (and the pantry doors have been removed since this picture was taken)…

I love the color it adds to the room, as it’s between the kitchen and the pantry so it’s a space dedicated to decorative items when it’s most useful to me as a storage space. So that’s where I want to add the cabinets. Of course, the cabinets fit the cabinets in the kitchen and they look like an extension of my kitchen cabinets, but here’s the general idea.

Even if I just did the lower cabinets and left the upper wall space free for artwork, it would add some useful storage to the space.

Right now, since our addition isn’t built yet, I don’t really have any other spaces I can add storage to. I have areas where storage can be optimized. I have a cabinet in the hallway that needs a lot of organization.

I did one drawer a few months ago, but I still need to do the other drawer and upper cabinets. The bottom cabinet is my cat’s litter box, so it’s not used for storage.

But as my mom and I talked, I realized that I had overlooked a great opportunity for extra (closed) storage in the hallway bathroom. Going back to when Matt and I bought this house, the bathroom in the hallway had this closet in the corner, but it was hidden when the bathroom door was opened. So to access the room, I had to come into the bathroom, close the bathroom door and then open the room.

When I remodeled the bathroom, I completely changed the configuration. I moved and widened the bathroom door, then added double doors that swing into the hallway so that this area is not covered by an open door. Then I completely gutted the closet and added a low cabinet underneath…

And then added open shelves above…

Here’s how it looks from the hallway…

I love open shelves. I think they are beautiful, they make a room look bigger and more open, and I love any opportunity to add beautiful, decorative items to a room. But most of the time, I don’t think open shelves are practical for storage purposes.

As soon as I finish the studio and the studio bathroom, I plan to make changes to this bathroom. I already bought the wallpaper…

I’m pretty excited about it, so don’t rain on my parade. 😀 I’m planning to remove the tile accent around the room and bring the wallpaper to the wainscoting and I think it’s going to look amazing.

I have other plans like new sconces (which I already have) and a new mirror (which I already picked out). But I haven’t decided what to do with the open shelf area. From a purely decorative standpoint, what I really wanted to do was remove everything above the countertop and then wrap the wallpaper over that area to balance out the color. Then, once that inset area is wallpapered, I plan to add things like floating shelves. But that means completely redoing the boards on the ceiling (they don’t span the crown molding) as well as redoing the crown molding.

But from a purely practical standpoint, I think what I need to do is extend the closed storage to the ceiling, eliminating the open shelves altogether. So for now, that’s my plan. I need to think through every little detail before fully committing to this plan. For example, what do I do with this small piece of wall?

Currently, as the walls are painted with a very light and neutral color, the sliver of the wall disappears. But when I wallpaper the walls with dark floral wallpaper, the silver of the wall screams for attention if I wallpaper it. I think it looks silly, but I don’t know what to do with it to make it look intentional.

So I’m going to think through this plan. I think I like it a lot, and I definitely like the idea of ​​having more usable closed storage in the house.

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