Simply Done: The Bachelor

Aug 30

Filed in : Bedroom Organization, Kitchen Organization, SO Clients

while I lived 2,000 miles away from home for the last several years, family and friends in my hometown watched from afar as i started and developed this organization blog / business. Now that I’m back home, the calls and e-mails for organization help have started rolling in.
And honestly – I love it!
Not only will this be a good thing for my business portfolio, but doing organization jobs for family and friends pushes me out of my comfort zone. Helping someone that pays me for a job is one thing. But helping someone I personally know? It puts me way out of my comfort zone because I really want the system or ideas to work for them. If it doesn’t, they’ll come back to get me. 😉
Last week I spent some time with a childhood friend at his bachelor pad. My friend and I go all the way back to catholic elementary school. Yup – a good 25+ years…Or more. But who’s counting?! Oh, the memories made with our little class of 19 kids. Those were the days.
Jerry contacted me to ask if I could help him re-organize a few spaces in his home. He lives in the home owned by his late grandparents. There is a lot of deep, personal history tucked away inside these 4 walls. Turns out Jerry has a few roommate’s moving in and needed to make the dining room and kitchen more functional. He also wanted to set up a family photo gallery wall. And finally, he needed some help setting up his bedroom.
In addition to the spaces he needed help with, he shared that he was in a time crunch and didn’t have a lot of time to invest in new items. Not only was I helping him re-organize these spaces…But we were going to do it with only the items he had around the house.
A challenge? sign me up. I’m there to help you, friend.
I helped him over 2 days for a total of about 6-7 hours. We started with the gallery wall, because these baby’s take a while to create. Don’t be like me and forget to first take a photo of the wall completely empty. Also don’t be like me and forget to take a photo of the way we set out the frames all over his dining room table. Yup, we got lost in conversation and before I knew it we already had a few frames on the wall and no photos on my camera. hah!
We started by laying the photos out on his dining room table to come up with a pattern for the gallery wall. He worked closely with me for the set-up as this is a personal family wall, with a lot of precious history. Jerry decided to start in the middle with a very important Italian story – a story that holds a lot of meaning to his family…
From there, we slowly worked our way out – walking back and forth from the dining room to grab more frames to hang. Yes, I put him to work. There’s no sitting on the job when Sam’s around…

 

Between the 2 of us, we measured, leveled, hammered, and stood back to admire the work as we went. Getting there…

 

The completed photo gallery wall…
The history on this wall blows my mind! Each frame was hung with meaning…

For example, my favorite part of the wall is on the far left. You see his grandparents in the top frame. Below that photo are 3 small frames with a photo of each of their children. The 3 small photos to the left are the children of those 3 children. Follow me? So special and so much meaning. We created a place of honor in his home to share the faces that mean the most to him….And his entire family. I made him promise to take a photo of their faces the first time they come over for dinner and catch a glimpse of this wall.

Once the frames were hung, we stood back to take it in. It was breathtaking, but something was missing…

After rummaging around the house, we found this great table in the garage…

On the table he added standing frames with photos of additional family members. Now he can add more photos to the space without completely disrupting the wall pattern.

Gallery wall done…

 

Next up, his bedroom…The easiest job on the list….

All he needed help with in here was the placement of a few wall hangings…

 

Also, we located another side table in the house to act as a spot to hold books, keys, a wallet, his watch, etc…

 

He now has a very calm, clean space to retreat to….

By far the most challenging space was his dining room. This space is important because Jerry loves to cook, comes from a big Italian family and enjoys hosting dinner parties. We needed this space to be functional and flow openly for ease of walking around. As it stood before I got my hands on the space, it was very heavy on one side of the room…

 

The furniture is amazing – all owned by his grandparents. But was too heavy to be pushed onto that one side of the room…

All while the opposite wall was sitting empty…

First thing we did was remove the table leaves, which neatly tucked into the table itself. Then we moved the side board to the empty wall, placed a dining table chair on either side, and hung one of his art pieces on the wall above…

Muuuuuch better!

Already the room felt more balanced because that side board had been previously sitting under the long wall of windows.

Next up, we moved the 2 bars to opposite walls…

Moved the wine cabinet to a different wall, so it wasn’t pushed up against the dining room door…

And we also balanced the room a bit more with the wall hangings…

 

Since the bars were full of alcohol and couldn’t be moved until empty, it was a good opportunity for Jerry to sort through his collection, dump expired mixers, and combine contents of the same alcohols/brands.

Time for a dinner party…

We still have plans to tackle his kitchen, along with a very personal wall of kitchen items to honor his family. Hopefully we can get to that soon. In the meantime, Jerry is very happy in his newly balanced and organized spaces. And I’m happy I was here to help! I was proud that we challenged ourselves to re-work these spaces without buying anything new. We shopped around his home for items and re-positioned items to make his space look more open yet homey.

Simply done is going to be a regular feature around here! Can’t wait to share the next job with you soon – michael’s temporary home office and his new monthly bill payment system. What do you know, this is another elementary school friend. 😉

Have a great weekend friends!

(I linked up with tatertots & jello)

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