Finally, a cold storage!

 I absolutely love our house but the one thing I have always thought was lacking was storage space.  In our entire house we have a closet in each of the three bedrooms, a small linen closet in the upstairs bathroom and a small coat closet on the main floor.  We have a lot of cabinet space in the kitchen but it still hasn't been enough for my neurotic organized self.  In fact, last year when we visited the Parade of Homes, I got "closet envy" because all of these new houses had a plethora of storage space, something our house is desperately missing.  I really love having a home for everything and not having everything piled on top of each other.  I am always looking for ways to add organization to my home whether it be through new furniture, reorganization, bins or simply cleaning out the house of unnecessary stuff and one of my favorite places to visit when I can is The Container Store.

In our old house we had a large room that my parents generously did a surprise home makeover on and turned it into a cold storage where we could store anything we needed from paper goods overflow to holiday decorations.  It was a fantastic birthday surprise and one of the hardest rooms for me to leave when we moved to our new house.  Our new house has a small little room downstairs that I quickly designated as our "someday" cold storage and it became the room we put overflow stuff in, as well as items that were too big to fit in the kitchen or that we didn't use very often.  While we knew we wanted to eventually add shelving units to give the room more usable space, something always came before it and we had a hard time finding shelving that would fit the awkward space.

Well, after learning I was pregnant and Mike would be "moving" (I have to use that term lightly because Mike says he isn't moving, he is temporarily relocating), I told him that a cold storage was something I really needed/wanted to have done before he left.  We finally painted the room to brighten it up and then started seriously looking for shelving that would work.  After my parents recommendation, we ended up at Ikea and after a good three hours of designig, we purchased all the makings of what was to be our cold storage and headed home.

It took us almost a week to assemble, install and organize our cold storage but I am ecstatic with the results and can't believe how much useable space we now have.  We still need to put a door on it but for now it will work perfectly!   

The Before Shots:  Literally we just piled everything on top of each other and never knew what we had or what we needed.         

The finished product!  Each of the drawers pull out so it's easier to find what we need.  We still have plenty of space and I look forward to completely filling it up!

 Thanks be for building it, to Bob for helping move all the stuff downstairs, to my parents for their recommendations and helping Mike secure it and to mi madre who passed along her gift and appreciation of organization.