Sorry girls.....

.....but he's all mine!

Not only do I have a good looking, hard working, kind and loving husband, but he's also very handy! He can fix almost anything and is getting very crafty at building things too.

As promised, here are the overdue photos of the pantry makeover.

Our mudroom used to be kind of a "catch-all" for anything that didn't really have a home. Apart from being overflowing with jackets and footwear, we also stored pop and other random things in there.

Because the pantry in the kitchen is uber small, we had been storing any food that didn't fit in the kitchen in the closet at the bottom of the basement stairs. Not a terrible place for it, but having to run up and down the stairs every time we needed something got to be a real pain.

 One day, I had a brain wave to relocate the pantry to the mudroom and to move all of our off season outerwear to the closet at the bottom of the stairs. Brilliant, right? Except that my great idea meant a  fair bit of work for my handy husband.

One weekend, he got down to it. Out came the old shelving. I didn't think to get a good before photo, so here is one from before we actually moved in and another part way through the dismantle.

Then he set to work measuring and cutting to install shelving along the back wall and a small coat rack and shoe shelves along the side wall.

The shelves are going up!

In one weekend, Chris got the pantry shelves up. The side wall would wait until the following weekend. The boys thought that the shelves were a fantastic fort and had quite a bit of fun playing in there.  At least we are certain teh shelves can hold some weight!

(Blogger won't let me flip this picture. There's always got to be 1, right? Grrrr.)

The next weekend, the rest of the shelving went up, including some smaller shelves and some drawers for mitts and toques, etc.  We've got shoe shelves now and a smaller coat hanging space for just the "in season" jackets.

Its absolutely perfect and I am so proud and thankful to have such a great husband!

Ugh. Super annoying that the pictures won't load the proper way. Oh well, just turn your head. ;)

Pretty awesome, eh?

But wait! There's more!

The boys have been really into Playmobil lately and recently got some knights. They were very creative and did use a rock structure to stage some battles, but Daddy thought they should have something better.

Daddy suggested they build a castle together! It took nearly all day Saturday and yesterday, but build a castle, they did!

The boys were so excited this morning to find it completed and waiting for them in the living room!  Chris wants to add a few finishing touches to the draw bridge and I need to make some flags to go on the flag poles, but its pretty well done.

Yep, we're pretty lucky to call this guy Daddy and husband!