Mabey She Made It

Happy Valentine’s Day! Instead of any Valentine-themed posts, we’re going to continue our tour of Mabey Manor. If you missed the introduction or Entry, Living Room, and Garage posts, you’ll want to check them out–these are some pretty awesome before photos!

Today we’re starting our tour in the kitchen. If you look at the doorway in this first photo, you’ll see the living room (which was part of the last post) and the other doorway you can kind of see at the right of the photo leads to the garage. Now that you’ve got your bearings where we are in the house, I’m going to show you the biggest flaw to the whole house–a layout issue that shouldn’t be too hard to fix, but will make a big difference. But first we’ll talk about each room.

The kitchen is pretty straightforward at this point. When we moved in there were no appliances, the sink faucet and garbage disposal were broken, and other fun things that Chad fixed. We were without a fridge or range for a week and a half–but that’s another story. So there’s not too much to point out here except that the walls are painted paneling, the cupboard doors are plywood that was hastily hung, and the cupboards themselves are pretty old. But other than that the kitchen isn’t too bad. Our dining room table is in here, and it’s a little squishy once you get table and chairs in here.

Here’s a slightly different angle that shows where the fridge goes and the doorway into the laundry room. There’s really no storage in the kitchen, so we’re using a closet in the laundry room as a pantry.

So what are our plans for this room? To start over. But to understand a little better let’s go into the laundry room.

Here’s our awesomely huge laundry room. It’s really big, which is nice but it’s almost too big. I like the built in storage above the space where the washer and dryer are, but they’re old and the doors don’t stay closed when there’s something in them.

This next shot is the wall that backs the kitchen. This is the closet we’re using as a pantry right now and a few notes.

1. The closet doors had to come off so that the shelving was accessible. It’s made a huge difference in usability in here, but it probably won’t make a difference once we get things changed up.
2. Um, yeah. More paneling. I shouldn’t have labeled it.
3. All throughout the house, they put the casing up above the edge of the paneling. It’s so strange to me.

Here’s another closet in the room, and it’s HUGE! Like 3-1/2 feet wide and the length of the room (plus some). It’s big enough for a sideways closet rod (1), deep shelving (2), as well as some utility stuff (in the other end of the closet–yes there’s another end).

And now we’ll head into the bathroom. Are you seeing the problem yet? This is the ONLY way to get to the main bathroom. Yeah. When guests come to my house, they have to go through my kitchen and my laundry room to get to the bathroom. Awkward! Especially since there is often peanut butter or yogurt smeared on the kitchen table and laundry (clean and/or dirty) near the washer/dryer. But we’ll talk more about that in a minute. First the bathroom.

It’s a pretty big bathroom, with some nice features. We will keep the sink and faucet because they’re our style and in good condition. That’s one funny thing about this house–there are touches of nice mixed in with a lot of odd. An oddity you can see is the light switch–in the middle of the room. There’s a switch by the door, so you think that runs the light, but no, it’s for the fan. So strange. And more brown paint. We joke that they found a couple of 5-gallon mess-up paint buckets at Home Depot. It’s not a pretty brown.

Another plus in this bathroom is that there’s TONS of storage. See all those drawers and cupboards up there–we hardly use any of them. Why? Because of this wall-o-cupboards. They’re huge, deep, and have so much space in there.

The tub and toilet areas aren’t much to talk about–pretty standard, although I can’t help but point out the lovely wood toilet seat… (You saw that one coming, didn’t you?)

So now that you’ve seen the rooms, here’s the plan. There HAS to be access to the bathroom from the main living area. So that wall of brown cupboards has to go and we’ll add a doorway there.

We’ll also knock out the bathroom/laundry wall and the laundry/kitchen wall to A) combine the bathroom and laundry into one larger room and B) expand the kitchen. Here’s a sketch of the plan.

This will give the bathroom two entrances, a hidden laundry area, and a nice modern kitchen space with a bar area and still room for our custom table. It will also expand the entrance to the kitchen from the living room and make it a little more inviting to move around the house.

As for finishes, here’s some of our ideas for the Kitchen

Follow Mabey She Made It’s board Kitchen Ideas on Pinterest.

I think we’re going to go with gray cabinets, white walls, and a really open idea. I also want to stencil one accent wall with a fun design in dark/light gray paint similar to one of the pins.

As for the bathroom/laundry, here are our ideas for those spaces:

Follow Mabey She Made It’s board Bathroom Ideas on Pinterest.

and Follow Mabey She Made It’s board Laundry Room on Pinterest.

Now what do you think? I’d love to hear your ideas, see your pins, and come up with a really cool, functional space!