bye bye built-ins!

Maybe it's the nice weather, but we have FINALLY taken on another big home project. I've had an idea to paint the family room for months now, but just haven't gotten to that yet. And then, it happened. Sam shared an amazing idea.

The amazing idea means waiting longer on the painting fiesta, but I'm OK with that because it was... errr, an AMAZING idea. We have (or should I say had?) large built-ins in our family room that took up an entire wall and were bulky in size.

Family room built-ins before...

Even with the room being quite large, the built-ins always felt like a little too much. My plan originally was to just paint them and all the trim white to match the rest of the house (and ultimately brighten the space), but instead, we're going one step further by removing the top of them.

We love the storage the bottom cabinets offer, and we also love the window seat, so we kept the part we liked and said goodbye to the rest. We skipped purchasing an expensive tool and just hand-sawed each side off. While it wasn't the easiest approach, it worked just fine. Sam sawed, and I held the pieces to help keep them from moving around (again, it was cheap wood AND poorly put together, so it could be done without a fancy tool).

So, without further ado ... bye bye built-ins!

Built-ins no more!

You'll notice some deconstruction on the left wall there. We ran into a mold issue. Yikes!

At one point some water got trapped between the built-ins and the drywall. It obviously wasn't ideal, but I'm glad we found it. It was only behind the wood, so we would have never known otherwise. It hadn't gotten through the drywall or into the floor, so that was a sigh of relief.

Sam and his dad cut out the wall with the mold, and we're going to have a professional fix the drywall this week. Cannot wait to close that back up! Once the wall is done we can move on to our next step, which is painting the walls, the remaining built-ins and the room's trim. Following a good paint job, we'll add floating shelves to replace the bulky top of the built-ins.

One step at a time. More to come on this room transformation!