The Dining Room.....The bones are finished!

For months and months, I have been working on a huge project for our dining room.

A project that would add much needed storage to this house.

For some DUMB reason, when we built this house, we failed to notice that we had NO storage of any kind...

Nothing but the closets in each bedroom, and the kitchen/bathroom cabinets.

I mean, who does something like that....

And if they do, who doesn't realize it until after the framing and drywall are done?

Ummmmm, that would be US!

So a lot of time we've been in this house, we have been looking for ways to create storage.

One day, while I was cruising through various blogs, I came across a picture of a dining room that had used two identical cabinets connected by a countertop, to make sort of a "buffet".

(Sorry, I looked for hours for the inspiration picture and just couldn't find it)

This would be a perfect solution to much of our storage problems!

Even better, we already had two matching cabinets that we could use.

Similar to this one:

The color just wouldn't work for what we wanted, so I asked hubby to paint them.

Yes, paint them.

Once hubby realized the world wouldn't come to the end if he painted the furniture, he started.

However, just like the majority of projects in the household, the completion of painting the cabinets only took around 2 1/2 years.

I'm telling ya....when a "Slacker Mama" marries a 'Slacker Daddy", projects tend to take a LONG time to finish....

That is, if they get finished at all.

Anyway, once the cabinets were painted, we realized if we put the countertop directly on the bottom part of the cabinets, it would be way too low to be used as a "functional" counter, so we had to come up with a solution.

My solution was to just build some boxes that would raise the countertop to an appropriate height and allow for some additional storage.

We built these boxes literally the night before Marty's first carpel tunnel surgery.

I knew that if they didn't get done then, they wouldn't get done.

We worked in the garage, right in the middle of a horrible thunderstorm.

Marty helped me get started, and I actually finished the nailing all by myself...lol

After the boxes were built, they remained unfinished for a few weeks....as does most projects in this house...

But as Chelsea's party day came closer, I knew it HAD to get finished.

Hubby, using his one good hand, and I managed to get the boxes painted and everything set up....

Everything except for the countertop.

We measured and went to get the perfect countertop.

Little did we know, a 12 ft long countertop is NOT standard, and when ordered, is VERY expensive.

I was so upset!

But after my meltdown, we went to an out-of-the-way place, and found exactly what we were looking for.

PLUS, it was cheap and they delivered.

You can't get much better than that!!

With the cabinets and boxes painted and the countertop delivered, all we had to do is clean and sort all the junk in the dining room, and get everything set up.

It took a while to sort all the stuff, but we managed to find a place for everything!

Here is a before picture:

 (UGH! Hate that green!)

And here is our completed dining room storage project:

The fabric "skirt" is the same material as the curtains.

There is a TON of storage hidden behind that skirt!

This is a close-up of the boxes we built to raise the countertop height.  I found these fabric boxes on clearance at Hobby Lobby.

I still have to actually decorate the dining room, but for now, I plan on just enjoying it!

You know, since it's not often that this household actually sees a COMPLETED project!

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Adding another photo of this area decorated for fall.  Still not finished decorating the entire room, but it's a start!