This may be the most beautiful photo I have ever posted on RG.
When we were looking for a house, we made a wishlist of sorts – the kinds of elements that we were hoping to find, but could theoretically live without if the house checked off our Big Stuff (good school district, a playroom/office area, within reasonable commuting distance to Kendrick’s office, etc).
Our wishlist included things like exposed beams, an open floor plan, a nice outdoor space, and some kind of bonus area where Kendrick would be able to set up his recording equipment (which is big and involves lots of wires, hence the problem with setting it up in, say, a corner of the living room). The latter is a tricky one, because we were really spoiled at our last house: the previous owners had turned our garage into a sort of studio space, so he just got that whole area to do whatever he wanted with. Here, not so much: every room in our place is small, and there’s just nowhere for all that equipment to go.
When we moved in, our plan was to section off a portion of the garage for him to use, but…I mean, you know how it goes with garages and attics and basements and such (and our home – a one-story ranch – doesn’t even have the latter two areas). Things get piled in, and then things get piled on top of things, and then all of a sudden untangling all those things becomes a massive project that gets put off and off and off.
And then Francesca came to visit. I gave her the tour of the house, and she was very nice and complimentary, and then, as an afterthought, I opened the garage to show her our storage/laundry/theoretical bonus space. She took one look and said, “Oh. Oh, no. We’re going to have to do something about this. Let’s do it tomorrow.”
(I love her.)
So when Thursday afternoon rolled around we put on my most beat-up pairs of sweatpants and sweatshirts, hauled out a bunch of garbage bags, and attacked the garage.
An hour and a half later:
Look! It’s my crazy blue lamp!
I mean, it’s still a garage…but isn’t it kind of cool? Over the long term what I’d like to do is turn those open shelves into closed cabinets (so they look less messy) and pick up a U-shaped desk with drawers for Kendrick, but in the meantime: this will totally do.
What We Did:
- Hauled as many boxes as possible (the ones filled with things that only come out once in awhile, like Christmas ornaments, etc) up onto the slats in the eaves of the garage to clear out more floor space.
- Covered the bookshelves with random extra blankets and tablecloths we found around the house to make the sectioned-off space feel cozier. Obviously this is a kind of silly-looking, temporary fix, but it also makes it look a bedroom belonging to a teenager who listens to a lot of Grateful Dead, and I’m okay with that vibe.
- We have a lot of large Tupperware storage bins in the garage, so we decided to make some of them into extra surface space for Kendrick’s equipment (which isn’t pictured here – I didn’t want to mess anything up, so I left the setup of that stuff to him) by stacking them up, covering them with tablecloths, and setting a kitchen countertop remnant (basically a large slab of faux-marble we found in our garage when we moved in) on top.
- Used our old dining room table (which we both love too much to part with) and all the chairs we haven’t found anywhere else for in our house (my grandmother’s 1970s floral armchair, a bright orange leather chair, one of our old Ikea dining room chairs) to make a seating area.
- Finally, finally found a use for the beaded curtain that I bought six years ago in Nashville and that I’ve been carrying around with me ever since.
- Scattered around all the random photos and artwork that we’ve collected over the years and haven’t found room for in the house.
- Hung a macrame rope planter from the ceiling, because why not.
It’s not – and probably never will be – the most spectacularly beautiful spot in our house, but I also love what a solution this is: it gives Kendrick the space that he needs, and also transforms a no-man’s-land into a casual, kind of fun spot filled with stuff that we love.
