Dreaming & Scheming - The Built-Ins Part 1

I know it's really bad that I haven't posted in a week and my last post was about FOLLOWING THROUGH.  But we haven't been doing much house stuff lately and I haven't finished any craft projects so I didn't know what to blog about.  What I have been doing is thinking about all the things I want to do around the house.  My ideas have been keeping me up at night as I think about what each thing will look like and what we will store there.  So it's time for another edition of Dreaming & Scheming.  This edition is three parts with parts 2 & 3 coming Wednesday & Friday.  

Everything that we add to this house I want to do my best to make it look original to the house.  With the porch we did a traditional beadboard ceiling and tongue & groove floors.  When we put up the coat rack I did my best to match the stain to the original wood trim.  And built-ins scream "old house with character" to me and I am surprised that this 1921 house only has one in the bathroom.

I plan to change that and add built-ins GALORE.  I love built-ins.  They look great, add character & value to the house, and have wonderous storage.  I have plans for what will go in most of them, but not all of them which is wonderful.  I love having space to grow into even though this house is pretty small compared to modern expectations.

So here we go.  Back to my charming professional Paint drawings!  This is what this space looks like now:

That buffet will move into the dining room once the kitchen/dining room renovation is done.  But for now it's a nice piece of furniture to anchor that wall in the living room.  That heat register will probably prove tricky, but hopefully we can put on an extension thingus to pull it to the front of the built-in.  And that dumbly placed light switch will have to move along with that ugly track lighting.

And here is what I dream & scheme it to be like in the future:

Obviously this picture is not perfect (ha).  I think I drew it a little too tall, and I drew the fireplace flat against the wall when really it will come out into the room like that little cabinets do.  I do want the cabinets lower than the mantle, however, unlike the inspiration picture below.

Originally my idea was just to put in a fireplace/woodstove, as shown here back in November, 2013:

But then when I was on Pinterest I saw this and my wheels started turning.  Why not add MORE storage?!  Plus this looks so Craftsman (which is the style of our house):

I don't want to have glass doors though, because I'd like to be able to put ugly odd things in there and have them be tucked away.  One side will be DVDs and the other will be open for future options!  The wonder.  Plus with our space constraints we will just have one little cabinet on each side.

The other thing you may have noticed is that there a wood stove inside our fireplace.  This is my (hopefully) genius idea that I really really hope will work.  I want the efficiency and heat of a wood stove, but the looks of a fireplace (gotta have a mantle to decorate and a place for stockings).  So here's to hoping we can install one (I figure we'll open up the wall [and expand the closet of Bedroom 1 to hide the pipe] to get the exhaust up to the attic and out the roof) and then build a traditional looking fireplace around it.

When we take the hidden-inside-the-wall-chimney down I am hoping we can save enough bricks (they are in such bad shape [you can see the bricks in the attic] that I worry they will all just crumble to dust) to use them in the fireplace.

As part of the kitchen renovation we will have the original hardwood floors refinished. Then we can start building the built-ins because the carpet will be out of our way.  I cannot wait to get to this stage!