Archives for November 2013

A Tale of Two Closets

November 13, 2013 By amusingmjblog Leave a Comment

Welcome back to closet week here on the blog!

Monday and Tuesday I showed you AJ’s hardwoods and his newly installed Elfa closet. That’s what happens when you do all the prepping right… now let me tell you about what happens when you don’t.

First, I have been drooling over Elfa and The Container Store since they invited me (and every other high school senior in Dallas) to their college prep sale where they show you all the cool space-saving dorm room things to buy. BRILLIANT retail marketing by the way… I definitely tried to talk my mom into buying EVERYTHING that I ABSOLUTELY NEEDED for my dorm room. True story… I’m the girl that wanted to go to debate camp after my brother got to buy all these awesome new school supplies that were organized into a fabulous file box. Yep… NERD alert. Anyway… needless to say, I love all fancily organized things… so I can get lost in The Container Store for hours.

If you have seen my 30 Before 30 list you know that the husband and I had planned on building some built-ins for the master closet to make it more efficient. I thought that we had done a pretty good job of using our space, but knew that it could use some sprucing up with some drawers and different shelving options.

But when my about to be sister-in-law got a friends and family coupon for Elfa we jumped at the chance. We thought about it and weighed our options: Elfa is more expensive but would be installed right away, I wouldn’t learn from the experience of building my own closet… but I wouldn’t make the mistakes either and although I like learning through my mistakes it felt like maybe I should try building other cabinets and drawers first before I jump into a huge project like this without any experience. With all of that decided we took our measurements to The Container Store and let her design our closet based off of answering a few questions. If you are going to go have them design one for you, here are the things I would know before you go:

All the measurements: height, depth, width
Where the doors are and what kind they are (bifold, sliding, etc)
How much space you need for different things: long hanging, short hanging, drawers, number of shoes, etc.

Once we did that, we put in our order (we actually did two closets at the same time, but the other closet isn’t even close to being put back together… so I’ll show you guys it later) and we arranged a pick up time, an installation time and paid for our Elfa. Since we had only two racks and two rods on each wall, we decided to let them do the demo. The installation guy would tear it down, patch and paint the wall all at the same time and that he brings with him flat white paint, so if it is something different than that, we need to provide it.

And here is where warning bells should have gone off in my head, but instead I thought… great! our closet is white, that will be perfect. So we cleaned out our closet and got set for our installation date last Friday. Our closet looked nice and empty…

The living room… not so much.

The husband has Fridays off, so he texted me photos while I was at work. It was going great… except for one problem. Can you see it?

AHHH of course you can see it!! Our closet is glaringly and obviously very NOT true white. (you’d think I’d have noticed that…) Aaaaannd we didn’t have any paint that matched the closet. But since the guy was there and already doing the install we just had to go with it. But I was totally kicking myself for not having done the demo ourselves and painting the closet when it was totally empty.

So that meant the husband and I needed to paint the closet AFTER the Elfa was installed. I know the white paint is crazy distracting, but look how great the Elfa looks! And the great news about Elfa is that it was really easy to take the shelves and drawers down to be able to paint. I mean don’t get me wrong… painting around all those bars and the top hanging rack definitely made painting 2-3 times harder and NOT how I was picturing spending my Friday night. But it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

So we made a quick run to Home Depot and picked out a light gray color. Its Behr’s French Silver mixed at 50% intensity. And this is what I was picturing when I pictured the Elfa in my head. It just took a few hours of late night painting to get there!

Tomorrow I’ll show you what it looks like with everything put back where it belongs… stay tuned!

Filed Under: Closets, Paint

AJ’s Closet

November 12, 2013 By amusingmjblog Leave a Comment

Welcome back to closet week! <sarcasm font> Nothing is quite as exciting as closets!! <end sarcasm font> Closets may not be the most exciting topic ever, but man… having a super functional closet makes a HUGE difference. As I mentioned yesterday, both my twin brother and I decided to install Elfa in each of our master closets due to having a great coupon from The Container Store. If you don’t know what Elfa is… check it out over at The Container Store (or just scroll down to the bottom of this post to see what it looks like installed!)

We found this video from house hunting to show you what the master closet looked like before AJ moved in.

After he moved in it looks almost exactly the same… just with a whole lot more stuff. As I shared in yesterday’s post, they decided to demo all of the built in’s in order to prep for Elfa. So here’s where we left of yesterday, having installed the wood flooring for the closet; so now we were ready for the Elfa guy to come install.

The Container Store gives you two options: install yourself or pay them to do it for you. My best friend swears it is a super easy installation, but our friends and family discount also applied to installation, so both AJ and I’s closets were installed by the pros. Demolition is included if you have 2 or fewer rods and shelves on each wall. But as you can see from the video above… AJs closet had a lot more than that, so he decided to do it himself rather than pay extra for them to do it. I chose to let them do it for me, but I’ll tell you more about how that went tomorrow. Moving on to the good stuff…

This is what his closet looks like with Elfa installed (in case some of you are worrying about the fact that his clothes only take up one wall… he’ll be sharing that with his new wife in the spring so it’ll all be filled up!)

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It hardly even looks like the same closet with a new paint job, new flooring, and TONS of Elfa Storage.

The Elfa system has something for everything and bonus… you tell the designers what you want and they design it all for you! You can see in the picture above he has drawers, shoe racks and even a valet rod to hold your outfit for the next day (or more likely in his case the dry cleaning he hasn’t taken out of the plastic yet). Check out the picture below to see the jewelry storage that they included in the plan for her side!

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And I know so many of you have patiently holding your breath since yesterday to see the finished floor…

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I love how the two colors look interspersed throughout the closet.

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And just so you can see the full transformation…. This picture was taken from almost exactly the same spot. (I just wasn’t as good in the first pic at having the camera straight up and down. 🙂 )

Stay tuned tomorrow for my master closet saga (hint: it wasn’t exactly a smooth transition… but the results are AMAZING!)

Filed Under: AJ's House Tagged With: Closets

Veterans Day

November 11, 2013 By amusingmjblog Leave a Comment

This is the time of year where I always think about my grandfather. He was a veteran of WWII, signing up for the Navy after Pearl Harbor, he and my grandmother got married before he left for the war. He was the captain of a sub-chaser. He used to tell people that Kansans made the best sailors because they were used to seeing nothing but horizon all day long. He loved the water and he loved Kansas. I can still see him in my mind showing me how to drive that old pontoon boat on the lake pointing to the trees I was supposed to be headed toward. His 94th birthday would have been tomorrow. He passed away a little over 5 years ago. Here he is reading to AJ and I when we were younger:

bimbam-reading

Anyone who knew him knew that he dedicated his life to serving others. He was the president of the family company I work for now and cared very deeply about public service and taking care of his employees. I still hear stories from the company that humble me and show me just how wonderful of a man he was.

But I think more than anything I remember how much he loved my grandmother and how much he loved all of us grandkids. He and my grandmother were married for more than 65 years and they loved and cared for each other until the day he died. I hope everyone gets to experience a love like that.