Adding a sliding barn door is a fun trend in interior design

4' x 8' hickory door with arch and textured glass

Converting a hallway into a walk-in pantry

Custom built shelves, floor to 11 foot ceiling. Note the receptacle in the wall, for plugging in appliances such as a food dehydrator. :)

Eventually there will be a rolling ladder installed.

Love the door from Lowe's.

We hired a contractor to build us a pantry where there used to be a hallway.
One side kitchen, the other side is dining  room.

The mental exercise of trying to create a cubism style painting

My weekend project—cubism for fun.

Top version is revised a couple of weeks later to make it more interesting with shading and I changed some of the colors.

Electric fireplace

The location of the proposed fireplace all taped up to see it.

It has been good to start working with painters tape to get a feel for the scale of our future remodel.  We want to add some walls, add some openings in existing walls and open up the kitchen area to the great room.  This is for a future fireplace that will be electric with lights and water vapor—it actually will look quite real and be better for the planet than a gas fireplace or wood fireplace.

Front DoorI

Our front door has always been white with a frosted glass and prism insert.  It seemed less than young and hip, although worked beautifully with Christmas decorations.  I finally got around to painting it last weekend and I am really liking it.

Before painting

Cautiously just painting the outside of the door itself

I saw right away that the sidelight would also need to be red

This is two coats Behr Paint (with primer)  I didn't like the white bar separating the reds but I didn't want it red so I picked a neutral dark taupe.

Three coats and it looks pretty good.  I should have straightened the mat for the photo.  The next question is whether or not to change out the stained glass for something with color.

Garage Tools and Pegboard

There is an order to this: nails, screws and fasteners first then drills, bits, screwdrivers.  Sockets, wrenches and pliers next. Hammers, chisels and measuring tools, stud finder and safety googles.  Somehow the order made a bit of sense to me—it kind of has a logical flow.

This is a temporary wall in front of the water heater.  Saws, clamps and grinder blades.  Only because they wouldn't fit  on the same wall as all the other tools.

The garage is not ever a finished organized space, it is always evolving to what fits current projects.
Right now our garage tools look like this, but every time I re-do the organizing it gets a little better.
I recommend a workbench built to the height that fits you standing to work but with a padded stool for those long projects. Regarding tools, I like to see everything at once to find what I am looking for so I spend less time trying to remember where I put things. Everything fits between the wall and the garage door opening so we can still park a car.

Tools where I can see them, on pegboard with labels.

Some crafts don't belong in the house.  Stained glass is one of them because of the lead solder.

I put the stained glass work area on the other wall of the garage so pounding on the main workbench wouldn't break the glass being stored above.  Glass is really heavy and the shelf I built is hanging off studs in the wall, with partitions divided by color.  I maybe should have built the storage on the floor but I really wanted it at eye level so I made the workbench underneath desk height instead of standing height.  Not sure yet if that is going to be a good thing….

Organizing my crafty office

Sometimes things come together nicely after a time of indecision.  I had a breadbox that I really liked the look of that worked well in our old house but not so much here in our current house.  I held onto it for a while waiting for an idea to strike and it finally did.  I needed a place to store cables, flash drives, cameras and chargers and stuff like that so I put them in the breadbox and put the seldom used but necessary PC monitor on top.  I prefer a Mac computer but some programs only run on a PC such as the embroidery software.  So the fact that the monitor is a little high for ergonomics really isn't a problem. And no, I do not want to turn my Mac into a PC with a go-between program.

Breadbox Storage