Storage and more

We enjoyed the long weekend with plenty of socializing and cooking and shopping so it wasn't our most productive three day weekend but it was a good one.  And we did manage to tackle a few important projects around the house too, including making huge strides in the storage and organization departments.  The biggest advance (in my opinion, at least) was the addition of a shoe rack to the master closet.  It's 33" wide, which fits four pairs of Brian's shoes and five of mine, by 11.5" deep, with 6.5" between the top 8 shelves and 8.5" between the bottom two (for boots and taller shoes).  I have now claimed seven shelves and Brian will get three - which seems like the right distribution to me!  It's just 3/4" plywood with 1x2 trim but it looks great and adds so much usable space to the closet.  One tip if you're thinking of doing something similar - we primed the plywood after cutting it to size but before we assembled it, and then Brian used the paint sprayer to give it two coats of finish paint once it was built.  Pre-priming and then spraying was definitely better than attempting to hand paint or roll all those shelves.   

While we had the plywood out, we decided to build a shelf for the laundry closet too.  We now have two shelves to hold laundry baskets and a chopping block type countertop for storage.  The countertop is just an Ikea desktop repurposed and cut down to size - an easy and inexpensive way to get a finished look for the shelving unit.  The unit itself is freestanding and then screwed to the walls - so if we ever need to get behind the washer/dryer, we can just pull it out as one piece instead of having to disassemble the entire thing.

Other non-photogenic projects included cutting down some more tree limbs (a task that never seems to end), cleaning the gutters, and installing gutter guards after realizing that the overhanging trees were starting to create leaf dams.  In order to do that, we bought a new 26' multi-purpose ladder so we can reach the top of the house.  We're going to need to get the garage built soon to store our ever-increasing inventory of household tools!