So we’ve never done a guest post before, but Bryan’s sister and her husband just completed this awesome project in their Atlanta home and were kind enough to send me the details. The DIY spirit must run in the family 
Here’s what Laura wrote about adding some storage in an unexpected place:
My family room used to look presentable. On really good days you might even say it looked kind of like the style of things from Crate & Barrel. But then we had our son, and Babies R Us exploded all over the room. It started with a basket of toys and a swing, which were soon replaced with balls, books, a toddler sized golf bag and not one but two baskets started to overflow.
Christmas was around the corner, and I started to not so subtlety drop the hint to my husband that I wanted a piece of furniture with shelves and cabinet doors so I could hide all this stuff. He toyed around with the idea, and after waking up one day on the couch directly across from all this stuff, he was hit with a brilliant thought – what’s under those stairs?
A walk‐in closet backs up to the stairs, and he cut a hole in the wall at the back of the closet to investigate. Yes, amidst the return air ducts and a few McDonalds’ cups from the early 90’s when the house was built, was a huge empty space. So “Handy Hamm” as I like to call him took the proper measurements and ordered a cabinet from http://www.wgwoodproducts.com. When it arrived he (GULP) cut into the dry wall in the family room, climbed in and built the frame to support the cabinet, which was three feet deep.
He had to move the electrical outlet over a few inches in order to ensure the cabinet could be centered on the wall. When you grow up on a farm, I think you just instinctively know how to do things like that.
(My kid usually wears pants. But we were in the midst of potty training boot camp, so please excuse the Thomas the Tank Engine underpants. And no, I won’t be writing a blog post about that because we failed boot camp miserably.)
The end result…Perfectly organized toys that disappear at a moment’s notice.
Great idea, right? I bet a lot of people in newer construction homes have dead space like this, so you might as well use it! And really…how cute is my nephew?? Ahhhh love.
Thanks Laura! And happy happy birthday to Darren, aka “Handy Hamm”
xox,
katie
