Saturday, May 7, 2016

Sewing Room Revamp - The Beginnings of Change

My sewing room has been the same for the past 7 years.  Wow.  No wonder I need a change!
I threw this one in because it was among a bunch of selfies that I took while procrastinating from doing actual work, and I thought it was cute.  I had a blast going back through all my photos to pick things for this post.
I love this zigzag ironing board cover.  I found it at Winners.  And by the looks of this, at one time, I managed to get a decent chunk of my fabric stash neatly stacked in this shelf.  It didn't stay that nice for long, let me tell you.
This is another part of my stash, and has been my arch nemesis for far too long.
These shots are from 2011, and things have not improved much, until the past few months when I finally started decluttering.
Can you even see my serger?  LOL
And this little pile of goodies eventually morphed so badly that they squeezed the ironing board out of its spot and it had to get set up in the bathroom.
Looks familiar.  In almost every shot of my sewing room, I see this.
And, just for fun, one terrifying glimpse into the closet of shame.  I will get to this eventually.
Last June, I decluttered my desks, and they actually looked pretty good, and maintained this look fairly well for the past year.  But don't look under the desk!
Here are a couple of pairs of jammy pants I was sewing before Christmas.  It shows the pile in the corner.  See, I bought a whole bunch of clear boxes to fit into my IKEA shelf, and I fit almost my whole fabric stash into them, but then I had no room to put them, so they've been sitting like that for several months.
And, to lighten the mood, a couple of gratuitous cat photos.  This is Lucky.
He's been around for 5 years or so, and he's really fun to have around.  Not quite as snuggly as Digit, but he's very entertaining.
Here is me back in February, and you can see behind me that the pile just keeps growing, up and out.  Something must be done!
So, the time has come to start the revamp project.  First step, remove the giant Expedit desk.  This involved a whole lotta decluttering to get to this point.
I got to use my new drill.  I love power tools.  Several years of upholstery will do that to a girl.  :)
The first thing I did was to build my new shelf to put on top of my existing shelf, to give me 8 cubes of new space.
 Then I built my new sewing desk.  
 It succinctly holds two machines, and there's lots of storage in the drawers.  When I finish rearranging the room, this desk will go right in front of the window.  I can't wait!
Shelf revamp: Before.
 Shelf revamp: After.  There is still a bit more fiddling to do.  There are two more clear boxes to put in the second to bottom shelf (and the stuff in the shelves all has to go somewhere else), and I have some new containers to organize some of my crap up in the top two shelves.
And look!  The corner is bare!
 But look over here!  There's still a whole crapload of stuff that just got displaced.  Ah, decluttering.  So much fun.
 See, my shelf isn't as organized as it used to be many moons ago.  But I cleaned it up a fair bit since I took this photo.
 Another kitty picture to lighten the mood!  Decluttering sucks!  Haha.
 One of my favourite features of my sewing room is the evening sun.  It is so pretty in here after supper.  And it's looking rather tidy in here!  There is no junk piled up on the bed.
My latest sewing project.  And showing how little things creep into all the nooks and crannies.  They're like gremlins!
This is what my corner looks like today.  My goal is to get rid of all this stuff somehow (including the bookshelf), because I need this space to be completely empty so I can rearrange the room and finally get the table into an empty spot, not right in front of the bed, in the middle of the room, blocking the bathroom door.
Speaking of the table in the middle of the room, here is another huge accomplishment!  I emptied all 6 of these tubs, and had a brainwave to fill them with specific categories of fabric.  Yeah, and here I thought I could get my entire stash into the IKEA shelf and not have to have bins under the table.  Bahahaha.  Nope.  I guess I've got a lot of sewing to do!  Anyways, now that these are organized, it looks pretty decent.  This task alone probably took somewhere between 3 and 5 hours over two days.  I should get a gold star just for this.
So, all that finagling was a big pain the butt, and now I am taking a break, and hoping that my revamping mojo comes back soon so that I can tackle the crap in the corner, probably tackle the closet of shame, cuz I'm gonna need to use a lot of that space, and then I can finally rearrange the room.  It's going to be amazing.  I'm even getting a peg board, and I have dreams of building a quilt board for one of the walls.  But I'm super excited to finally get this far.  It's been a long time coming, and it feels really good.

2 comments:

  1. Well done decluttering and getting things under control. If it's any consolation, my sewing room if probably a quarter size and about the same amount of stuff. I have a red desk like yours just a smidge bigger and takes 3 machines, but same drawers and I love having important things in the drawer right were you need them so I know you'll like yours. Can't wait to see the finish.Slowing sewing the stash!

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  2. I have moved into a smaller home and after sewing in the daylight basement, I am now in part of the guest room. So, I studied your photos carefully. Nice decluttering!!

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