God Bless Mary's House

Hi bloggers,

Wow! What a semester. I think this semester can be best summed up by some favorite words from my fabulous and cute as a button great nephew, Brayden,  “Are you kidding me right now…? (He just turned 3) I wanted to share with you a recent design in residential design II that I have been working on with my good friend and amazing designer, Gina Hicks.  We recently went to a homeless shelter in Greensboro, NC to visit Craig Thomas who is the executive director for Mary’s House, http://www.maryshousegso.org/. Mary’s House is a home where mothers and their children who are struggling with homelessness and substance abuse can come and get a fresh start. Our entire class broke up into two person teams to tackle each room on the lower floor. Gina and I chose the dining room because we have fond memories from our childhood of being at the table and we wanted for these families to be able to gather and eat, talk about their day, do art, and just enjoy each other. Our class decided on an uplifting color theme and concept for the space. We wanted it to feel happy, inspiring, and safe. We chose colors of yellow, orange, light blue, and teal. 

Gina and I were off to the races when I found these inspirations on Pinterest for our ceiling treatment and storage options and I was hoping she would like them and she did!

We wanted to give the dining room much needed storage and really make the wall where we planned to place the cabinetry to be a focal point. We kept the cabinetry a simple shaker style with white quartz tops and Clayhaus 2" x 8"  tiles from Modwalls, in the colors of splash, cookie, milk (matte), goldfish, zest, and teal agate for the backsplash. We placed a large section of open cabinetry in the center to house the coffee makers and microwaves and storage. 

 Speaking of storage we found these amazing entry cabinets from Ballard Designs which will help with some issues they have with not having much space in their entry way, (which is right outside the dining room), to put coats and backpacks, etc. We placed two of them right inside the door of the dining room to your right so that the kids coming home from school can set their backpacks there and have an after school snack in the dining room before heading anywhere else. There is a large drawer in the bottom so they can also house books and art supplies.

  

 

   These are our fixtures, furnishings, and equipment for the room. I love this art work that Gina picked out from Etsy and you can’t help but smile when you see and read it. Gina also had some custom art pieces made with acrylic and vinyl letters that will have the 12 step program guidelines on them because this house’s recovery plan is based on those principles.

 This is the floor plan for dining room at Mary’s House. The design Gina and I put together really streamlines the dining room giving them plenty of move around space and storage. It also gives them much more function than they had before and our hope is that they enjoy being in here as much as we enjoyed making this space better for them.

These are photos of how the room looks right now and you can see that they really need storage and more function to this dining room space.

 This is the fabulously rendered dining room perspective that my son Josh Pugh a professional photographer helped me with.  You can find him at:  http://joshuathomaspugh.wordpress.com/

One last thing that we presented was the idea that Gina and I had to incorporate the 12 step promises on the steps to the upper floor. These are steps that the women and children go up and down every day and what a fabulous way for them to see these and keep strong in overcoming their adversity. 

We all presented our design to Craig Thomas the executive director of Mary’s House, and a dear friend of hers, Betsy Isley, in our interior design department at Randolph Community College this week. They were really overjoyed at the designs and greatly anticipating the changes to the home that will impact these women’s lives.

Well that’s all I have for you today. Thanks for stopping by my blog today. I hope you have a fabulous day!!

Stop back by and I should have some further information to post about the continuation of this project and links to my friends and classmates blogs about this project.