Before, During, And...

I've blogged about our media room, but it's been awhile. First a bit of history. We moved into our house, built in the mid-80's, exactly a year ago. The house has about 2600 square feet and sits on a lot slightly larger than half an acre. We really do feel like we have a little slice of the Texas hill country.

We were drawn to the house for several reasons. We loved the spacious living room and kitchen and the flow between the two rooms. Also, the house had been completely redone by the former owner, so it was nice to move in and not feel like we had to start redoing anything right away. We didn't love everything about the house, though.

One of the things that almost deterred us from buying the home was the garage conversion. On the outside, the conversion is seamless. Pulling up to the side of the house, no one would ever know where a garage door once existed.

Inside, the former garage housed the washer and dryer, and when the garage was converted into a room, the washer and dryer hook-ups stayed. The little concrete lip that all garages have was also left as it was. Those two features made the room very awkward and not completely functional as a media room, which is what we had decided to do with the space. This photo shows the east wall with the washer/dryer area. The hot water heater is in the little closet on the adjacent wall on the far right of the photo, and the door just to the left of that leads to our kitchen.

The previous owner installed new carpeting in the room, and while the carpet was new and pretty, it was not practical in a room with so much water. In fact, we had washer problems and flooding shortly after moving into the home.

Over the past year, we've been making a few changes to the room. In order to camouflage the concrete "lip," my handy husband installed 15' of unfinished, stock cabinets.



We are in the process of painting the walls, installing the countertop, and building shelving to sit on top of the cabinets. We removed the carpeting and simply painted the concrete floor. We are considering installing self-stick vinyl tile, but there are some concrete repairs to be done first. I'll show you more pics as we make a little more progress. We're hoping to have most of the work done by the end of next weekend. Once the room is finished, we'd like to get a roomy, yet space-saving sectional sofa. What do you think? Are we on the right track?