Happy Monday! I hope everyone had a wonderful 4th of July and that you were able to spend it with the people you love. Over the last few months, I’ve been working to get our house in order. We moved in here back in December 2021, and we were so busy with work, we weren’t able to devote a lot of time to setting up the house and making it look nice. For the most part, we moved in, unpacked boxes wherever they made sense at the time, and then never took the time to “edit” things like placement. In my opinion, it is much more difficult to get the house in order after several years of living in a state of “this works, but not well.” So far, I’ve made it through the bedroom and the living room, and now I’m moving on to my office and studio. But before we get to that, here’s a quick look at what I’ve done in the bedroom so far.

The bed we had in the bedroom originally was large and it took a lot of room. It was a sleigh bed, and while it worked fine in our bigger master bedroom in the old house, here it was painful. We have a Sleep Number platform and mattress, so in order to use the nightstands, they had to be far from the wall, due to how far out the bed sat. We haven’t yet received the headboard for the new bedroom suite, but it should be here this week. I’ll talk more about the bedroom when I have it completely done, but the white furniture has already made quite a difference, and I’m very excited to get this room “finished.”

If there’s one thing that has been the bane of my sewing existence for the last five years or so, it has to be my studio. In our last house, I had my studio in almost every room at one point or another. I used an 11′ x 13′ bedroom, the formal living/dining room, which was probably about 25′ x 16′, the master bedroom at a whopping 25′ x 30′, and the much smaller, but still functional, home office at about 11′ x 11′. So when we moved to this house, I knew the “office” area would be used as my studio.

The problem that I’ve encountered to date with this room is that I haven’t really had the time to design a studio intentionally. We moved in December, which is a very busy time in the retail industry, even for mid-level managers, and we were so busy, we basically threw everything in the room and hoped for the best. Looking at this photo, though, really makes me wish it still looked this way. This room, though somewhat full, was overall, fairly calm and organized. I cannot say the same for the current iteration.

The number one issue I have with this room is that it’s never “ready”. You can see all the crap piled on the table – and this is AFTER spending 30 minutes cleaning it off – the baskets in the floor between the cutting table and the sewing machine, and the general state of WTH. What I need is a way to get this studio to “ready to work” status, where every time I walk in there to sew, I’m not having to spend 45 minutes to an hour cleaning up the room. The biggest issue is that everything doesn’t have a home, so things don’t get put up, or they get put up and I can’t find them again.

The second issue I have is that I have a lot of hobbies, and I enjoy jumping around between them. Just in this photo alone, you can see yarn for crochet, cross stitch, embroidery (both machine and hand), t-shirt making, and English Paper Piecing. After doing a fair amount of research on the subject, I have decided to separate quilting supplies and space from everything else. So the studio becomes a quilt studio, and my home office will become more of a craft space. It makes sense, because I’m not working anymore and I don’t really use my office for much at this point. Why not turn it into a craft space? The problem is, it’s a mess, too.

The office is currently a mess because it became a dumping ground for everything I didn’t know what to do with as I worked through the house to get the living, dining and bedroom straightened out. Obviously, this isn’t going to be a quick fix, because it involves two very messy rooms, but I got started on it yesterday. The first thing I did was to add this yarn organizer in the office. I love it, because it has zippers on all but the very top level, so it should protect my yarn from getting dusty.

Originally, I bought this organizer for the yarn, and I put it in the studio.

It worked so well that when Prime week rolled around, I bought the first organizer I posted, and when I bought it, I didn’t plan to move the yarn to the office. But the new organizer has zippers, and everyone knows that yarn should be protected from dust. I decided to put it in the office and move the yarn. So what did I do with this organizer after I moved the yarn?

I’m using it to store my Kimberbell embellishment packs and embroidery blanks!

The studio and office are both still works in progress, and I have a long way to go to get it completely worked out, but at least I’ve started. I’ll continue to work in there to get the room serviceable again, and I’ll report back … eventually!