The Cupboard Under the Stairs... Before !!

Don't worry.. this isn't some Halloween themed post about nasties in the understairs cupboard. Although as I'm now looking at the 'before' pictures, maybe I'm not so sure about that.. ;o)
No, what it's really about is getting off my arse [the darker colder autumn days making sitting in front of the telly my favourite pastime] and doing some work on the house.

I have recently been inspired by my favourite blogger Benita Larsson to organise a space I have been just putting up with for too long...

Yes it's the 'cupboard under the stairs'.. which also houses our hot water tank, and the access hatch to our crawl space. We don't have a proper basement..  most West Coast houses don't because of the high water table, but we do have a 4 foot high space which can be used for storage. 

One thing that has already been 'done' is the doors...   I had the much hated bi-fold doors removed and  traditional fully opening ones installed. Not just here but all over the house. The joy of this is that they open 180* flat against the wall, which means that every nook and cranny of the cupboard is completely accessible. I haven't finished painting them yet. The undercoat is done but I still have to do the final coat of CC40 Cloud White.. my favourite white.. I'm a broken record.  

  

So this is what it looked like before I started...

 

What a mess..







This space is directly adjacent to the kitchen, and as a result it has to fulfill a lot of functions.
On the floor you can see the big pale blue baskets we use for recycling. In Canada it's traditional to pay a deposit on beverage containers. Then when they're empty you can return them and get the money back.
So the right hand one is for wine and beer bottles, coke cans, OJ and milk cartons, all of which fall into this catagory.
The left one is for glass, cans, and cardboard. They do kerbside collections of these everyweek on bin-man day, or you can take them to the recycling banks.



The big brown box at the back has our fake christmas tree in... but after this year I'm going to find another place for that.
The huge tube, with the flowery cover hanging from the stairs is the working end of the house's built in vacuum, which I hardly ever use, since it's so cumbersome and heavy. I'd never pay to have one installed, but it came with the house and they are popular here so it will be a selling feature when we come to move. To be fair there is a separate tube and nozzle in the garage, which plugs directly into the machine itself.. and that's hugely useful for keeping the cobwebs down. 

 

There's a cool bag, a broom and my curling stick hanging from a nail on the right.

And the box to the left on the recycling bins, is wrangling a load of brown paper bags and empty boxes that I use for allsorts of things, and the dustbuster of course.. which I use daily.

Here on the left hand side is my beautifully hand crafted [yes that's sarcasm] plastic bag tube.. Don't get me wrong, it's not made of plastic bags.. it's for storing them. 

  

You can buy them, but why bother when it's basically just a length of fabric, sewn to make a long thin tube and then hemmed top and bottom with elastic. You shove the bags in the top to store them and pull one out of the bottom when you need one. Much easier than the alternatives. I do think I'll sew a new prettier one though for the finished organised cupboard.

Under it.. yes that's just a cardboard box that's being used as a shelf, which I will re-use because it actually works brilliantly. That's my staple gun hanging on a hook... plus there's a plastic rack for storing the tools for the vacuum. That will have to go.. but I'll create a better alternative.

So there you go..that's the 'before'. Not very exciting I know.. but today I cleared it out and was amazed at how much space there actually was..

See! it's huge.  

As you can see there is an enormous amount of under utilised storage space...  I'm sure I can make much better use of.  Of course the location of the hot water tank can't be moved, but there is a pretty big space behind it that I haven't made any use of up 'til now, I'll have to see what I can do about that. The floor is awful.. the same old vinyl that used to be in the laundry & loo when we first moved in. It's really scruffy and marked, and dealing with that might be my biggest challenge, since its stapled to the floor in places. I plan to paint.. maybe even wallpaper.. the side walls. Plus I'm going to paint out the stair treads, and finish the joints between the stringer and drywall with some trim. I also have a special idea for the inside of the door.. but I'll tell you about that once it's done. 

 There are lots of nails and assorted hooks screwed into the stair treads at various points by the previous owner [I assume] that I'll pull out and re organise... We use them a lot especially for extension cables. In this photo you can also see the handy little one touch light I put up on the door frame.

Both these photos show the gap between the stringer and the drywall.. that will get finished off more neatly.

That metal loop that holds the vacuum tube will also get shifted over to a more convenient spot. So that's it.. frankly it's taken me longer to write this post than it did you empty the space and take the photos. Now I'm off to the Home Depot to see if there's any wallpaper I like enough to spend money on..

Obviously I now have to do the actual work, so the results will take a day or two to post so bear with me.

Any suggestions for colour or pattern would be gratefully recieved..

Jo xx