Overall I loved the family room. Except for the weird ceiling fan, outdated paneling, random track lighting above the bar area, you get the picture.

And in case you don't, here's a really nice up close shot of it from right after we bought the house.

Well, I decided one day when my husband was traveling that it was time to take down the brackets. My cousin was here with me working on stuff and the 2 of us instead ripped out the dry bar. Oops! 

It went from looking real nice in the above photo to looking like this. 

But it's ok, a few weeks later I blogged about my inspiration photos for this space and knew that we'd get to it sooner or later.

And then 3 years passed.

I'm not even kidding. This thing was sitting in this lovely condition for the greater part of the time we have lived in this house. It got to the point where I didn't even notice it anymore. Until I looked back through old photos and this major eye sore was just sitting there staring at me. It's amazing how much you can ignore in your own house before it really starts to drive you crazy.

Oh look, its our pretty Christmas Tree in 2011.

And here is our Christmas tree in 2012. We got smart and started using it for gift wrap storage during the holidays.

Luckily, by 2013, I had had enough of and at least decided to paint it and put a table and some decorations in it.

Finally, in 2014 I was pregnant again and in a crazy nesting phase and told Erik we needed to do something to finish off that area. I wanted a bookshelf with toy storage because we had a crazy amount of toys with just 1 kid in the picture and with another one on the way I knew that the toys would be growing exponentially in our house. I did some renderings to show him what my thoughts were and to convince him that this was something we really needed to do.

I started with this. Some simple cubes with baskets to contain the madness of toys within the house and a sign that was handmade by some of our friends.

Then I rendered a wall full of cubes to see how that would look.

Cubes with some drawers above for additional storage and a big mirror or some other artwork to keep the space simple.

Bookshelves with doors (which ironically was similar to the dry bar we had originally ripped out).

And finally, a bookcase with shelves up top and some storage cubes below.

We chose the final option and thought it would work best for our family and needs. So, we called a friend of ours who does everything from woodworking to home building and got an estimate and timing to have the work completed in the Summer of 2014.

And today? No more ugly, unfinished hole in our family room to worry about in our Christmas photos. But in looking at these pictures I'm suddenly reminded just how ugly that fireplace really is. Ha! Oh well, maybe I'll get to that in another 5 years. For now, I'm going to sit back and enjoy how pretty our family room pictures and toy storage look until the kids awaken from their naps and come down to destroy the house.