"Weekend" Project

My husband loves me...
Like really, really loves me...
My husband understands that my "love language" is gifts...
that doesn't mean I need him to buy me diamonds to prove his love (although I wouldn't complain!), I just like gifts, no matter the size...

So guess what he "bought" me...

almost 5 years ago my husband bought me (and the rest of the family) a "fixer-upper"
...
yep, that's love...
I have always been the nerd with a slight crush on Bob Villa (This Old House)...what that man can do with an old house is...is...well, it make my knees weak!  I see an old house and I fall in love, I see the potential of those broken down houses, I think of the history, the love that was shared in the homes and I want to bring them back to their glory days...
So my husband, my computer loving, video gamer of a husband, agreed to buy us a 70 year old house (well, it was only 68 when we bought it!)...did I mention that I was 9 months pregnant and scheduled for a c-section (yeah, I'm going to be zero help!) when we bought this gem!

I'm not going to say he's not a handy guy...he knows what a hammer is, and his pretty good with a sander, and boy can he hang insulation (in Redding, in July, in a house without an air conditioner)...and I know that he's handier than he thinks he is!

So, more than 4 1/2 years later, we still have TONS to do on our "fixer-upper" or what I affectionately call our money pit!

We all know that old houses come with little to no storage space.  Ours is no exception...sort-of.
The room that our kids share has no closet..NO closet...the "closet" that was in the room at some point in the past was re-purposed as the stairs for the upstairs loft/playroom...it also has a huge wall that is hard to use, the door opens up to that wall =unusable space, it has a large awkwardly shaped door that leads to the attic, and then a small window...

...then walk out the bedroom door and WHAM, in the upstairs hallway there is the largest linen closet known to mankind!  A linen closet with NO shelves...and a closet made with particle boards not dry wall...weirdness (but, well, the whole house has many weird things like this!)...
so the plan...that I've had since day one...
*demo the hall closet and make a smaller more useful one in it's place.
*build a closet on the large wall with the awkward attic door in the bedroom...hiding the attic door inside the closet...
So last night we finished stage one of project closet..
The hallway closet is no longer with us...

some of the pretty wallpaper from inside the closet

...this house was held together with wallpaper when we bought it!

we've decided to also replace the closet with a piece of furniture, we are using a large black armoire as our entertainment center downstairs, but I want something different and my husband wants a flat screen...so we're re-purposing the entertainment center as the linen closet, taking the wood that we saved from the closet demo to build the closet in the kids room...

Okay, now I also forgot to mention that we planned and started this "weekend" project on the one weekend a year that my MOPS (mother's of preschoolers) have our HUGE annual photo fundraiser...so I've been gone all day everyday since Thursday, and am leaving here in about 30 minutes not to return until after 2!!!...so we are now praying and hoping that we can finish our project by next weekend...
Is it still a weekend project if it takes you 2 weekends?
Hopefully I'll be sharing "after" pictures next weekend!  Keep your fingers crossed!