Phase II – Stu-Stu-Studio!

Ok. So the way our house is laid out is that there are two bedrooms on the first floor and another, much larger bedroom and a bonus space upstairs. The second floor is up in the roof so the ceilings are slanted and overall the space is pretty cool. So when we moved in we claimed the upstairs bedroom for our own, set up one of the downstairs bedrooms as a guestroom, and one as an office.

Here’s a post from when we first bought the house that has pictures of each of those rooms.

The bonus space was always going to be my studio – it’s actually the room that sold me on our house – but we never quite got there. I mean why would I need to consolidate all of my creative stuff when I could just take over every room with it, right?

Yeah not so much anymore.

Now we’re going to use one of the downstairs bedrooms as the baby’s room and one as a combined office/guestroom. Which leaves no room for any creative stuff downstairs. So before I could even think about organizing a room for Gizmo I needed to organize a room for me.

Ready for lots of pictures?

Ta Da! It’s my very own studio! Let’s do a little tour...

The shelving is the biggest addition. And the biggest project. Nothing on those shelves used to be in this room before.

It was all downstairs along with many, many, many more books. Not anymore! We donated any duplicate architecture books we had, boxed any we haven’t looked at since graduation (bye-bye Ching!), and housed the rest here:

All of our photo albums (except for the ones filled with drunken pictures of college – those got boxed up for our kids to find and mock us for later) are consolidated on these shelves now, too.

Very handy for yarn inspiration!

Speaking of which I have some nice, white bins on order from The Container Store that fit into the bottom cubbies of the shelf. That way I have a place for all of that sock yarn in various states of preparation for sale.

Destination Yarn isn’t dead – it’s just on hold for a little while. Turns out starting a business and getting pregnant at the same time is a fail plan.

Dexter even has his own spot in my new space:

On a handwoven rug no less.

Then there’s my spinning spot:

That was there before… except for the shelf – which is a very handy place to keep my spinning tools!

The desk was there, too… but it was filled with things like thesis notes and probably hadn’t been opened since 2004. Now it’s home to my sewing supplies.

The dormer still has my bead table… but a much more streamlined bead table. Literally my storage solution used to be a pile of shopping bags. Not so much anymore:


Now that my beads are organized I have a feeling I’ll be much more apt to actually do something with them.

The other addition was this table:

I can fold it up and stash it in the dormer, or I can unfold it into a giant layout table for winding self-striping sock yarn. Very versatile.

Some of my crafting stuff did get packed up and moved into the attic... but it's easily accessible - the door in this picture leads right to it (and on the left of that door behind the book case is a half-bath in case you were interested in how our house is laid out):

The built-ins stayed the same. It’s all yarn. But I did go through and donate a whole bunch of really itchy acrylic and fun fur that I haven’t touched since 2005.

We also hung a bunch of things I’ve been wanting to hang for awhile like the loom I bought at the Museum of Traditional Textiles in Cusco:

(The door on the left leads to our bedroom, in case you were wondering)

And some pretty new Ikea curtains:

I really love my new space!

But most of all I love that even when life gets crazy with the new baby I will have a place to continue doing all of the things that I love. Plus I'm pretty sure we can fit a pack 'n play somewhere in here...