The Mom Cave

Last year, prior to moving to our new house, i decided i wanted to built a fort.  Yes a fort, but after building it, my kids labeled it the Mom Cave.  At the time, i was suffering from a really bad case of psorasis, how i got this is a whole other story, but at the time I was on high doses of predisone (steroids) to try correct the rash that was taking over my body.  Well if you know anything about steroids, they either make you cry or do wacky things you normally wouldnt do.  Well steroids combined with cocktails at night, really made me do things I normally wouldnt do.  Like build a Mom Cave. 

Well at the time it was early November and it was getting cold.  It started out because I wanted a place I could go outside and smoke, but not be exposed to the elements.  So I decided to build the Mom Cave in the garage, next to the refrigerator.  It started out very simply as shown above.  Shutters were hung hiding the shelves usually used to store garage crap.  Next I added some rugs, a chair and then a few ottomans.  I added a old cabinet/painted black that was going to be used as a bar next to fridge.  At this point it was looking somewhat stylish and I was digging the Mom Cave. 

But then, the steroids really kicked in and I took the Mom Cave to the next level.  Well, when i started writing this i thought i had more pictures of the finished product.  Seems I don't. But let me describe how this morfed into the most screwed up projects of my long list of screwed up Do It Yourself Projects. 

Well to explain how i got all my materials, i need to tell you that a friend of mine's house burnt down.  And she said I could take anything out of the house that i wanted.  Now remind yourself that Im all juiced up on the steroids.  So I got my caving hat, dirty roofing clothes, gloves and boots and I was ready to puruse the remnants of the burnt out house and  start sifting through the wreckage.  Now imagine going into the burnt out house was like going into the Titanic, everything is dark, dirty and stinks like you cannot believe. All the windows are boarded up and it is totally pitch black.  Soot is everywhere.  And it really could have been quite dangerous, because of the glass, burnt floor boards, etc.,   But being the Hunter/Gatherer/Dumpster Diving/Cheap Ass/Professional that I am, I smelled smoke and Craigs List Booty.  I invisioned selling my treasures on Craigs List and making some cash.  One funny note, that when i started selling the furniture, people would ask me if the furniture came from a smoke free house.  I would say yes it did, but little did they know, it came from a house that went up in smoke.  So needless to say, I didnt make much dough selling this stuff on Craigslist.  (See below what the house looked like...btw...I salvaged those two benches)

a couple of nice chairs and the table is on my deck now

But I did find treasures for the Mom Cave.  Now this Mom Cave had a theme.  Because my son plays football at Mizzou, it would become the Mizzou Mom Cave.  This was a fun project for me, because when my son went to college on a full ride football scholarship, I bought him all the things for his dorm room in the Mizzou theme.  Like you would do if you had a girl starting out in college.  Everything matched and everything was Mizzou theme.  So as you probably would guess, the Mizzou themed dorm room went over like a lead balloon,,,no 320 lb. 6 foot 6 inch Lineman wants a Mizzou themed dorm room, so I was stuck with all the themed purchases.  So what a better place to use them was the mom cave.

So I had all this Mizzou crap and burnt furniture, so it was all the right ingredients for the project.  First I started by painting the garage walls (well the portion of the garage I was building the mom cave in, the garage went from a two car garage to a one car/mom cave garage) BLACK AND GOLD, Mizzou colors, and the floor BLACK, not a small project in itself seeing as the walls were very pourous concrete blocks and it was freaking cold out.  I then added the shutters from the burnt out house.  Then I started hanging large bamboo blinds from the rafters (from the burnt out house) floor to ceiling with wires and zip ties to create walls and add some privacy for my smoke breaks.  Then went up black fabric panels around the bamboo blinds to give it warmth.  Chairs, coffee tables, rugs and knick knacks such as lamps, trash cans, even a disco ball etc. to create the ultimate MOM CAVE AMBIENCE.

I so wish I had pictures to show you how much of a bad idea this was and how it became to look like someone's homeless shelter under a bridge in downtown St. Louis.  But everyone loved it.  The neighbors would come by just to show their friends the MOM MIZZOU CAVE.  I so enjoyed my hours spent in the frigid confines of the Mom Cave smoking enjoying a cocktail watching the spinning disco ball rotate in the badly hung christmas lights strung from the top...It was going so well and I had visions of a large flat screen TV and a stereo system in my sight...  But one day it all came to an end.

The day I bought the Space heater/Fireplace.  That's when my husband shut er down.  You see I had Christmas Lights, a Strobe Light, several lamps all attached to power strip plugged into an extension cord that hung from the garage door opener on the ceiling.  So it was pretty Jerry Rigged to say the least.  And in my husband's opinion an extreme fire hazard...With all the cords, electrical, now space heater/fireplace and on top of it,,,and me smoking in the cave at night...I guess he had no choice than to shut me and the Mom Cave down. 

So shutter by shutter, bamboo panels, rugs, smokey chairs and ottoman, it all came to an end and one one cold Febuary morning...it was delivered to the dumpster.  The walls were repainted white, the floor grey and the MOM CAVE was only a sweet memory of my Fort and my days on the juice.