Ten years – My Entry then, now and what the future may hold

With my ten year anniversary of starting work on this place I thought it would be cool to do a look back through the years. Some of these rooms have changed A LOT over the last decade and some of them weren’t even real rooms when I started! Our entry was only half this size when I first purchased this place. The other half of it had been my grandparents’ wood shed for as long as I can remember. The door to get to it was outside right beside our front door. It was my mom’s brilliant idea to incorporate it into the house and my gosh of all the changes I made to the house that may have been the best decision of all of them.

After gutting the entry it was obvious that the wall between it and the wood shed was not load bearing. It was all built as one room, at the same time, so taking the wall out was easy. From there the entry literally doubled in size!

I’ll never forgot my mom coming by to help me put the new floor in as I had majorly hurt my back in the week before that. You know that wasn’t going to stop me from working though lol so she came over to give me a hand.

I had already hung all the joist hangers and was just cutting 2x6s to length to drop in.

With my back injury on the right side it was actually more difficult and painful for me to drive the screws in than to just carefully move the boards around and into place after I cut them.

So, I had about half the joists in place and ready and waiting for screws.

When I handed Mom my impact driver and the pack of 4″ torque screws her look was all of, “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?” She had never used an impact before and didn’t think she would be strong enough to drive the screws in.

I knew exactly what she was in for and just waited for the world changing moment.

She had no problem putting in those giant screws and did a little dance and no small amount of cheering on how easy it was! (It wasn’t long after she bought herself her own impact driver lol.)

Until writing this post I had all but forgotten about the days before Impact drivers and the moment I used my Dewalt the first time.

It was legitimately life changing!

From the beginning I always planned this space as the dining room / entry / laundry room. It means our dining room table serves a ton of jobs which is great because we don’t actually use it for meals very often so at least its never an unused space which I know has happened to a lot of dedicated dining rooms.

It was just too narrow to be a living room too and I think that would have just been awkward to walk into.

Over the years here I really day dreamed of OTHER ways I could have changed this home to better it during the renovation but when you’re dealing with older homes there is only so much you can do.

I really am not that fond of having our laundry room in the closet by the dining room table but I still look around and can’t think of a better spot I could have put it.

I know a lot of people put their laundry in their basements but screw hauling laundry up and down stairs lol.

Where I grew up I was hauling my laundry down a spiral staircase plus too more sets of stairs!

It ended up here because I was really concerned putting any of our plumbing out in the “addition” which this entry is part of as its all on a peer and beam foundation.

It gets really cold here in the winter!

But that totally hand cuffed me when it came to plumbing as then all of our water and drains on the main floor could only be in the original 500 square foot home that’s over the basement.

The pictures I’m going to be sharing here are simply my favorites over the years of our entry’s evolution.

At one point I had the most darling little desk area here that ended up completely impractical for me.

But it was still just darling!

For a long while we had the entry divided into two spaces using one of our antique dressers which actually made a lot of sense. Someday we might go back to that as it made a much more defined almost “mud room” beside the dining area.

Currently though having the entire space so open is really nice especially in the winter time with coats and boots to get off etc.

Future thoughts? For sure I need to replace the fabric on the back of our sliding doors on the closets or to just replace those doors entirely.

I like the closet but it isn’t exactly what most people have.

I literally just used a book shelf I had on hand to stick in the center for shoes and then a rod and shelf went in on either side of it. Its a really long closet to either side and its great storage… However, it does mean we have to kind of climb in to get to the majority of our coats and things.

On the other hand I always kind of hated having to dive under coats to get to the much more common long and short shoe shelves that most closets have.

HOWEVER, saying that, having shoe storage the entire length of the closet might be really nice! Right now we barely have enough room on the shelf and it requires a lot of shoe stacking…

Another idea I had over the years was maybe I should have left the wall and instead made the old wood shed into an office with the addition of a big closet for the entry. But that was really because I was broke and single here after my divorce and had literally locked up half the house so I didn’t have to heat it, leaving me awkwardly sticking my desk in the living room for awhile.

It was then I managed to make my quant little office area out here anyway that I still used for years before finally getting my office done last winter.

This space still feels pretty big and long to me for us to just “walk through” it every day. As an entry that really is its only purpose and this is not a big house for a whole room just to serve as an entry for us.

But I guess that’s just the frugal chick in me talking too much and over thinking it – she makes me feel like its a lot of wasted space.

The rest of me, of course, actually likes the open space!