The elephant in the house

Almost everyone has that space in their house that they just don't really know what to do with, so they leave it in some form of dysfunctional state until they figure it out. For us, that room started out as the "game room". Henry had a pool table, and since this room is a converted garage it seemed like the perfect place to put it. Our intention was to put in a small bar and a tv and all of our old school video games and have a place to hang out. After a while, we realized that the room was really too small to play pool, and we needed the space for other things. I actually covered the pool table with a baby shower table cloth and used it for scrapbooking for a while. I think that the "man cave Gods" were probably angered by that. We recently got rid of the pool table, and the room is now called the "den". I use that term loosely because it really is a collage of different things, and we now know that it needs to function as a tv room, a home office, and a craft room. It's right off the kitchen and there's an attached half bath (on the opposite side as the kitchen), which is great because it's also a guest room when we have company.
There are perks to having this converted garage den. For starters, it has french doors at the end which let in alot of light and allow you to exit the room without going through the house. They are also great for ventilation because the room has no other windows. Who wants to stare at the side of the neighbors house anyway. Another perk is that it has an exterior door to it from the kitchen which means that you have more sound seperation from loud children, and you can close it off from the rest of the house if you want to. This leads me to the problem. You'd think that since we use this room so much, it would have been one of the first rooms we fixed up right? Wrong. Since we can close it off and no one visiting has to see it (unless they are an overnight guest), we have spent our efforts on the rest of the house that we really don't even use anymore. This poor room is like the ugly step child that gets all the leftovers and hand me downs from other rooms. We finally replaced the old ratty mini blinds that were there when we bought the house, with wooden blinds. We only did that because we had new windows installed and realized that the blinds wouldn't fit back in the opening anymore. We have a decent sized closet in the den, but it has the water heater smack dab in the middle of it. That makes storage an issue as things that are stored in there are usually not easily accessible, so we have had to find other ways of storing things. That brings me back to one of the functions of the room: a home office. Here is what we have devised for the office space. Feel free to snicker, laugh, and poke fun. :)

On the opposite side of the room is this:

I don't think this picture needs as much explanation as the other one. Everything that you see is pretty much what it really is. I should add that the shelf in the top left corner is hanging on by a thread and likely to fall any day now. A book shelf purchase is imminent. Ignore the junk on the table and in the floor, I just haven't cleaned up after my latest project that I will blog about you can be sure.

There are a few other interesting storage things in there like one of those hanging closet organizers that you're supposed to put sweaters in. We mounted a 2x4 to the wall and made a little hanging system to hold up the organizer. I have my fabric in it sorted by type. It's not pretty, but it works. Now just for the record we do have a plan in mind to spiff up this room, but it requires purchasing new cabinets for the kitchen so that we can install the old cabinets in the den and upgrade the room from slum dog to millionaire. Ok, maybe it won't be as fancy as a millionaire, but it'll look better than it does now. That's one of the reasons we are living with it in such a sad state, we don't want to spend alot of money remodeling it when we will get supplies for free later on. Some people call that being "green", I call it "thrifty & on a budget". I'm hoping to strip off the remaining wallpaper border soon so that I can at least paint the room, which will make a huge difference. That border is evil and I have no idea what it's up there with, but I have a plan A & a plan B. Someday this room will be awesome, but until then I will continue living in my vagrant like room and loving the fact that it finally has an identity and a purpose, even if it does look like a shack on the bayou.