Attic Makeover

It makes me slightly giddy to look back at these before pictures knowing what this space has now become. There will be a series of posts here, so stay tuned if you're one of those people who keeps up via blog readers (which, as a side note, an apology to those who roll old school and actually click on our blog..our sidebars and such are seriously out of date). It's so much faster to blog from Picassa but it only lets you upload 4 pictures at once and a photo collage will just not do this project justice. There will also probably be a lot of chatter text, so if you're just interested in the basics, please skim. This is the biggest rennovation we've done on this house, so I wanted to be sure to capture what I could recall. So here we go...

Permanent stairs that lead up to the attic. The door is located on the back of our house off of our bedroom. You'd think it was a closet door since there are no closet doors in our bedroom, but alas, it's a staircase. One of the reasons we rennovated this space was to give Justin a closet. I work out of a wardrobe, we share a dresser, and his old closet was in Grayson's now-new-toddler-room. An architect said it was basically impossible within our (very limited) budget to turn the staircase into the hallway so the goal for the rennovation was to make a new closet space, a sewing/office space, and a living room/playroom space.

Let me just say that these before pictures were taken in February of 2009, when we started seriously talking through this. I can't believe how much brain space has been freed up inside of my head in the last 2 weeks since this project has been (basically) finished. I can now drive by a yard sale or take a trip to Hobby Lobby or Lowes without dreaming about what this new space would become. I know that some people are really into home rennovations, and from my giddyness mentioned above I can sort of (no I can't) see why. It sure was nice to be able to close that attic door and at least not see the mess, even if we were thinking about it all the time.

Ceiling shot from the stairs. Notice the old 100+ year old beadboard everywhere....

Top of the stairs (readers are about to get up close and personal with all of our attic junk)...

Pic of the front side of the room, standing at the top of the stairs. Please ignore the junk and focus on the walls, ceiling, floors, etc! With virtually no closet space in this house downstairs, having this floored walk up attic was/is a huge blessing, even though it was an organizers nightmare when all of our stuff was just sitting up here. It about gave me a panic attack whenever I ventured up. As Justin always says, a fish grows to the size of its tank. If we ran across something, I'd just say "awe, just throw it up in the attic and I'll deal wtih it later". Yeah right.