Kitchen Appliance Closet

Kevan and I have a 2 page list of projects that we need to work on.  Projects like "redo the well house", "finish framing the bedroom windows", "fix chainsaw", and many other projects.  Well, we both had the day off yesterday for Martin Luther King Day and when Kevan woke up he asked me what we should work on.  Of course, we should work on the MANY projects we need to finish, but what fun is there in that?  ;o)  So, I told him we should redo our ugly "middle room".  Which isn't on our list at all.  lol!

The reason I wanted to do this was because I NEED COUNTER SPACE and my appliances take up way too much of it.  I wanted an appliance closet.  Here is what my counter looked like beforehand.

Our ugly middle room is a room that contains our water heater and a green/yellow shelf unit.  We believe this room was the back porch before they built on to the original home.  It has an "outside door" in the kitchen leading to it and then another "screen door" leading to the wood stove room (which also used to be a porch before they walled it in).  Here is a before picture.

Due to the ugliness of the water heater side of the room I have refrained from showing you for fear you will have nightmares.  We've only used this room to hold our recyclables and bird seed.  Side note - we do not have garbage pick up where we live (I'm not sure if we can...I've never asked) and we are supposed to take our garbage to a city dump, but Kevan and I HATE the idea of putting things into the landfill.  So, we recycle what we can, throw the food trash into the woods for the animals (one day we will compost it or give it to our pig/chickens) and then burn the rest in our outdoor burn bin.  Sometimes, we do have items that we can't burn or recycle and those do end up in the landfill, but that doesn't happen very often.

As you can see in the picture above, the room has paneled walls.  We have this paneling in a few places in the house (soon to be painted) and one room upstairs that is filled entirely by this paneling (one day maybe I will post pictures). I'm not really sure what the previous owners were thinking.  Maybe they thought it was paint by number.  

Anyway, the first thing we did was remove the shelf unit and I started to paint the paneling.  I had Lowe's tint a small can of Zinsser so it would cover better than regular paint and to ensure it would stick to the paneling.  It worked great and the color ended up matching the surround of the screen door perfectly.  Then, Kevan built the shelving out of a single 4x8 sheet of  plywood.  This was a LOT cheaper than buying individual shelving with the pretty laminate.  I wasn't really worried about prettiness.  I can paint or stain them one day.  Here is a picture after the paint and after Kevan installed the shelves.  Maybe we can do something to the floor one day...but that isn't a priority right now.

Here is a picture of Kevan sanding the sides a little bit for me.  He didn't want me to get a wood splinter.  He's so sweet.  (Also, the lines you see on the wall are the groove lines in the paneling...no paint can fill those in).

I could barely wait for him to finish and pretty much kicked him out while he was still sanding because I was SO EXCITED to move all of my appliances in.  Don't they look great?  I also love that I have recycle bins now for metal, plastic and glass!

A picture of my counter now.

Much better.  My favorite part of this project wasn't actually the counter space.  It was something my husband said before we even started the project.  We were in the car on our way to Lowes and I asked him why he was so excited to do this project (because why would he care about my appliances.  lol).  He said, "Because I know it will make you happy."  Is that not the sweetest thing you've ever heard?  

But, just so you don't think he is "too" sweet...while we were at Lowes he asked me to hold this big piece of wood with my legs so it wouldn't flip when he stood on it (he was seeing if it could hold his weight since we will be building a bridge).....anyway, when he stood on it, it flipped and SMACKED me in the leg.  HARD!  I have a 4x4 inch bruise on my leg now.  He just laughed.  I was almost breaking out crying at Lowes.  So, he isn't all sweetness.  lol!

Below is a Before and After Pic.