New cabinets and a new paint color add up to a prettier and more useful laundry room.

Roger did most of the work, although I did help bring the ridiculously heavy counter top upstairs…TWICE.  We had to cut the counter to size (go go new circular saw!), which wasn’t a big deal. The huge warp in our front wall, however, was a little challenging to hide.

I’ve had a crazy urge to paint lately, and this project satisfied that craving. Roger and I painted the walls Friday night, and I painted all of the trim Saturday. Then we both painted the mailbox and stair rails outside Saturday morning. It was a beautiful day and we were on a roll, so why not?

Read the rest of the post to see before pictures and how the kitties helped on the project.

Before…

This open space seemed perfect for cabinets and a counter.

The shelf was home to way too many things, including an iron I haven’t used since we moved in. Definitely time to add more storage!

The process…

Roger did a great job installing the cabinets. I was really impressed. I would have never tackled a project like this on my own, but it was extra fun working on it with him.

Amelia made sure we were doing it right.

Clara suggested an alternative use for the drawers.

This is the short version of the story though, the TLC episode if you will. Check out our photo site for more pictures of the process.

Our office was really more of a dungeon, and after picking up a laptop a few months ago I hadn’t really used the room for much more than throwing crap into it which didn’t belong elsewhere. The closet was a dumpster of large bins filled to the brim with random wires, parts, and adapters – many dating back 8 or so years.

The project started with putting out 4 boxes to categorize my wires into – computer wires, video wires, audio wires, and power wires. Only after I sorted through 2 large bins and a duffle bag did I really have an understanding of what wires I actually had. After that I went back through these boxes, tied up the wires with zip ties, and threw outdated cables and cables which I had numerous duplicates of into a donation box.

After a trip to Staples to pick up some medium and small sized organization boxes I went to the task of organizing all the little things in my office – CDs, DVDs, memory cards, batteries, gameboy games, adapters, screws, etc. etc. In the end I ended up with 6 large drawers organized into Media, Devices and Accessories, Gaming, Computer, Video, and Audio – these held all the wires I decided to keep as well as all their related adapters.

It’s only once you’ve organized all your stuff that you realize how many duplicates you have, or how much stuff that you are holding onto that is totally useless or obsolete. In my case I managed to come up with quite an impressive list of things to donate or toss, including:

• 12 mice (almost all PS2 mice)
• 5 hard drives (who knows what is on these, finding out next week)
• 3 parallel port cables (despite not owning any parallel printers)
• 6 video cards, 2 modems, and 2 coaxial network cards

Once it was all said and done I ended up with 2 construction sized black trash bags of trash, 1 medium box to donate, 1 medium box of stuff to give to others, an all-in-one printer to toss, and a monitor to donate. I can only hope that I really don’t end up needing that 800mhz Pentium 3 I threw out, or the 48mb of EDO RAM.

Here are a few pics before:

Here are a few pics after:

Something tells me the hard part going forward will be not trashing it back up again, but I figure I have quite a long way to go for that to happen, and there’s no time to get started like the present