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As I mentioned before, Carey and I have recently decided to turn one wall of a downstairs playroom into a craft room/mini-office. We spent the better part of Mother's Day weekend (and the days before it) working on such a project, and, as promised, here are the before and after photos.

Before
The walls in this house were either all covered in horrible, horrible wallpaper or left mostly bare, adorned only with some fairly ugly trim. It's one of the things we didn't like about the house at all, and Carey and I have spent a good amount of time adding color (or, in the case of wallpaper, replacing the color with paint).

The playroom had a flower border all along the top, but the walls were still basically all "contractor white." Yawn.

I didn't take a picture before we'd begun clearing out the room, but here's one mid-way through the prep work:

After
The process took quite a bit longer than necessary. First we steamed off the flower border. Next, Carey primed the walls. We ripped the baseboard against the one wall out (keeping it in good shape, as we'd later use it again). We repaired a dent we made in the drywall while doing the former.

Then we painted. Two coats, both on Saturday. I forget what the name of the color is, but Carey calls it "peanut butter." Because of the burgundy carpet, she sometimes jokingly sings "It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time" when she enters the room. 😛

Between painting Saturday, I'd screwed on several spacers to the cabinets (two of these and one of these).

Sunday morning, we ripped up the carpet and set the cabinets on top of the padding, then set the cabinet (a 10' laminate in this pattern) on top to make sure we had the measurements right. We used a metal yardstick as a spacer and drew lines on the padding, then cut it out. We measured corresponding holes on the carpet (measuring from the wall, and always cutting a bit less than we thought so we'd have extra to trim if necessary). We put down tack strips, then set the cabinets in. They were level, so we didn't need to shim them. We rolled the carpet back over and made a few more cuts, then hammered it back down onto the tack strips.

I found the studs and screwed the cabinets into the wall. Then, we put the countertop on and affixed it to the spacers I'd previously installed. Finally, Carey glued the countertop end pieces on. On Monday, we bought and installed the shelves, and I sanded off the overhanging pieces of the end pieces.

In the image below, you'll see I've added a black line. Our intent is to eventually put some black peg board here so that Carey can hang more of her scrapbooking supplies. The chairs come from Oak Express and were fairly inexpensive.

All told, this was perhaps one of the more involved home improvement projects we've done, but we're very happy with the results.

P.S. We've yet to decide what we want to do for the toe kick, which is why it's currently unfinished.

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