Making the Most of Unused Space

Have you ever taken a look around your house at all of the wasted space?  We had a spot in our family room that was a complete and total waste of space.  On the fireplace wall of our family room, the fireplace comes out in the middle and on either side, is just a big hole of what I thought was mostly unusable nothingness.  

On the left we have a bookcase that holds our Blu-Ray player and our satellite box.   On the right... nada.

Enter problem #2- our house is a 3 bedroom house.  We take one, Khloe takes one and the other is an office.  You can see more on how I created this office here, here, and here.

I love this room for crafting, sewing and being creative.  But when it comes to the computer, we could forsee issues.

Issue #1- When we have another kid, we'll need this bedroom for a nursery. (this will be a while... hopefully)
Issue #2-  I hate feeling like I'm trapped in here while on the computer... I want to be where everyone else is
Issue #3- When Khloe is a teenager, I really don't want her in a separate room from us while she's on the computer... this would prevent me from being obnoxious and over-bearing :)
Issue #4- While the desk is great, there is no file storage.

So, to my handy-man husband I went again.  I had this idea that we could fill up the empty space in the family room with a built in desk.  My idea was pretty basic, but Chris took it and ran with it.  Now our family room looks like this. (forgive the blurry picture, I obviously had a case of the shakes)

Don't ask me how he did it, I have no clue.  I just know he took regular old boards from Lowe's and made the cabinets and rough-cut lumber to make the top.

We have a stack of rough-cut lumber outside that we plan to use for our porch, there is some extra, so he used that for the top of the desk.  It is pure cherry wood with Natural stain and quite a few coats of polyurethane.  He planed them down to make a smooth finish and glued them together to form the counter top.

The cabinets on the bottom (like I said before) were just plain old boards from Lowe's.  It amazed me that he made these.  The drawers on the left are file cabinets, plenty for all of our personal and business files.

For the handles, I chose these oil-rubbed bronze ones from Lowe's.

When it's all said and done, Chris estimates we had around $70 in it.  There is no way we could have bought a desk that fit perfectly into this space for that amount of money.

Now I just need to either re-do that chair or find a different one for the desk. Oh and I guess now that I have filing cabinets I have to go through all of our paperwork.... YIKES!

Here are some updated pictures of the rest of the family room just for giggles.  But, don't get used to it.  I'm in the process of painting the trim and putting up new curtains right now.

-Brooke