I cannot wait to share with you… what’s behind that door on our recently finished stairway landing.  This room is actually one of my favorite transformations.  I think you will be shocked.

What’s behind that door?

But first…… Did the weekend go by fast, or what?

We had our Easter celebration all day Saturday.  We got together with our family, and never in my 150 years, do I remember the weather being so nice.  The kids actually had their Easter egg hunt wearing shorts without rain or snow.  That rarely happens.

Therefore, Easter Sunday, here at the House on Winchester, was a day in which we celebrated alone…as in by ourselves.  It was Sunday Funday, after all.

Sunday Funday around here means we can do whatever we want without judgment.  We can work around the house if our little hearts desire.  If I choose to sit on the couch and read magazines, catch up on my favorite blogs, or just pick at my fingernails all day, that’s just peachy.  If Deb wants to start watching the last half hour of some dumb movie, she does.  Seriously now, she can get into a movie that is already half over.  I don’t get it.

The weather was fabulous.  It was a great day to walk the trail with Ivy and soak in all of the green leaves that are making their appearance this Spring.  It was a terrific day for a home-made veggie pizza, and a snack of crackers, cream cheese, and hot pepper jelly that I canned last year with our million leftover peppers.  Yummy!

This Week’s Goals

It was, also, a perfect time to discuss this week’s goals here at the House on Winchester , aka “The HoW.”   Our garage is half full of furniture and we have a storage unit full of goodies that all need to be gone – SOON!   Ginormous piles of “junk” clutter my mind’s creativity.   I feel like my wheels spin and I get nowhere.  Clutter can literally make me feel heavy, and I find myself walking from place to place, never accomplishing a thing.

That makes me wonder what it was like living in this house when it was full of “stuff.”   I know how I feel when our garage is half full of goodies and our storage unit is renting a space in my own mind.

O.V.E.R.W.H.E.L.M.E.D.

To be honest with you, I cannot show you the full-fledged BEFORE pictures of what’s behind that door.  They are too disturbing.  I would love for you to see them so you know exactly what we started with.  But, you will feel sad and that’s not we are about here at “The HoW.”

They really show the sadness of a hoarding situation and how bad one must feel to let their environment get that way.  It was EXACTLY as you see on the television show “Hoarding – Buried Alive.”

Hoarding has been linked to depression and anxiety.  One feels depressed and anxious and they can’t throw anything away.  And because they can’t throw anything away, they feel anxious and depressed.  That cycle spins until the situation is so out of control, it becomes unmanageable.  Can you imagine being on THAT merry-go-round?

That brings me to the plain old “before” pictures of what’s behind that door, which is, after all, what you are here for.

The Bathroom

So, we started with a blank slate.

Are you diggin’ that wallpaper?  Now, don’t worry…..

I didn’t want you to think we repurposed that toilet.   That wouldn’t fly with me considering I have a phobia of toilets.  Basically, strange toilets make me barf.

Yes, the whole bathroom’s belongings, along with a few other things sprinkled about, are piled on the now-complete stairway landing.

We needed pretty much one of EVERYTHING to get this room put back together, but let’s start with the doorway.  Remember this picture taken from the stairway landing looking toward the bathroom?

We decided to move the bathroom door opening to the right about a foot for a few different reasons.  The previous door opened up into the bathroom swinging left, therefore cutting a significant amount of usable space out of the vanity area.  And, also, we would basically walk right into our now bigger vanity if we left it where it was.  So, it made the most sense for us to move the opening to the right and use a sliding barn door style for this area.

This picture is inside that bathroom looking out to the landing.  The original bathroom had cheap looking “new” wood trim that didn’t belong in this house.  So, the wifey re-purposed some wood trim from another one of the doorways we previously tore out downstairs, to trim out this area.  And, of course, we installed our favorite inexpensive pine board flooring.

The goodies we used for the bathroom…

And looky here, why don’t ya….  This is the antique buffet turned bathroom vanity and the ginormous mirror I painted and used for this space, but you’ll have to wait until the final reveal to see that.

You won’t want to miss the posts later this week when I show you what we did with these pieces and how we spiffed up one of the walls in the bathroom.

And…….BUH BYE NOW – Said in a loud, high-pitched old lady’s voice, because how else could you say BUH BYE NOW?