Evolving ideas

So the electrician came yesterday and started wiring things up. He's not done and we found out that he's kinda working us in when he's not on this really huge job that he's also doing. That's ok with us, it gives us time to ponder things. Like not getting that tankless water heater that we were going to get. We just decided against it, it's not really worth the cost to us so we scrapped the idea. If we had gas piped to the house then it would be a different decision entirely, but we don't so that's that. So back to pondering things. We are somewhat masters of using almost every inch of available space. When you have a relatively small house and a bunch of people and lots of things, you get creative on how to organize and store things. Let's look back at out very first act of creating usable space from "dead" or hard to access space, the coffee bar.

Here's the before and after on that. The cavity for the coffee bar existed before, but it was accessed from inside the pantry. As you can see, (refer to the finished picture or this description will get weird) it's not a terribly deep space, but it's wide. When you put that into perspective with the previous version, that makes it narrow and long so basically you could fit your arm in there but not the rest of your body so it made this really awkward space to say stash a broom, have it fall to the back, then you couldn't reach it without serious effort. We have neighbors who have put shelves in that area and that would have been a great solution except that the idea of a coffee bar was super appealing to us. Also, if you do shelves for that entire area, you still have the issue of not reaching what's in the back and if you didn't make them go all the way back you're wasting space so whatever, we made a coffee bar. This has been a fabulous feature for us as it frees up counter space in the kitchen and we think that it is visually appealing. We still have plans to trick it out a little more but for now this is what it's like. (See Henry there in the corner of that pic? His "desk/office" is right there for now so he's really digging the coffee bar ;) LOL)
So what other space saving/space using plans do we have now?? I have that answer along with a poorly photo shopped proposed "after" shot. When the framing was done upstairs to create the hallway, it created a dead space between two of the walls. We've been racking our brains trying to come up with ideas for that space so that it's not wasted. Henry to the rescue when he said that it would be great to put shelves in, and not only shelves for his office, but shelves for the bathroom. His office shares the wall with the back of the tub (complete with its own toilet! - just overlook that) So anyway, if he has shelves or custom drawers in there, he could put books or cds or photos or all of those random cables and usb sticks and such in there. His office is really small and that little bit of extra space for all of the little things that clutter up everything could make a huge difference. The area between the walls is only like 12" wide, but it's deep so that's when the idea for the bathroom shelves came in so that we could utilize all of the dead space. I didn't photoshop his side, but I did photoshop the bathroom side so in theory it could look something like this----------------------------------------------------------->
It could be a space for towels or wash cloths or makeup or extra toilet paper (in baskets) or something else pretty and decorative. It could also help alleviate that jumbled mess that's under the bathroom sink. By both rooms sharing the space, it ensures that the shelves won't bee too deep to reach things that go to the back of them. So there you have it, our latest brainstorm and plan to utilize all of the extra space that we can. ~Kellie~