We moved into our lovely house in February and I L-O-V-E, love it. The house was in great shape when we moved in and we were able to just bring our stuff in, plunk it down and start living. And that's what we did. We've been making the best of our old furniture in our new space, and for the most part it's working, but there's one place where it is definitely
not working: the office/creative room.
You would think with a larger dedicated craft space/office than I've ever had before, that I'd be able to keep it tidy and useful... Ha! Part of this is just me. I need to create better habits of putting stuff away when I'm done with it. The Boyfriend likes to say that I'm the Queen of 90%. I'm full of ideas... I'm great at starting things... I'm not so great at the last 10% of the project, which often results in clutter.
I know that for me to put stuff away - I need it to be easy. Like, ridiculously easy. The less steps between me and "away," the better and some of the things in the space were just not working. Like this beautiful armoire:
I got this a couple of years ago and thought it would be a great way to "contain" my craft mess. Ha! It kind of worked... in that I could close the doors to the mess if I wanted to. But I like things open and available when I'm creating and in keeping with my personality, those doors never got closed. I don't have a pic of it fully in action, but here's a shot of it partially cleared out in my craft space....
Trust me, I wanted this thing to work. I painted it my favorite color ever, Coastal Cabana (now retired), and tried several different configurations. In the end though, it was just too deep for most of my crafting stuff. It was good for holding/hiding my printer, but if/when it jammed, it was a pain in the tukhus to get into the back of the printer. So in the end (and after having moved this incredibly heavy piece of furniture twice....) I decided it was time to go.
It turns out getting rid of it was not as easy as expected.
On both of my last two moves I hired movers (Best Decision Ever). Professional movers have an amazing ability to make heavy stuff look relatively easy to move. The Boyfriend and I tried to lift it, but I was abysmally miserable at holding up my half. Luckily, my neighbor was home and willing to help. The two men worked at it for waaaaay longer than we expected. They tried it vertically, right side up and upside down. The tried it horizontally. They tried taking off the door to the office. They tried removing the little feet. Nothing. (Well, I shouldn't say nothing, they did manage to ding up the armoire, door frame, floor and wall...) This thing was Not Coming Out.
Finally they tried it tipped at about a 30 degree angle and it was out. Whew! Now it's sitting in the garage waiting to hear about it's final destination. I'm thinking it will work as a nice display area for my Pop Up Sale this weekend (I really need to write a post about that as well).
Whew!
We definitely didn't make as much progress on the redo as I had hoped over the weekend, but it's a start. We got that beast of an armoire out and that's no small feat, we made a trip to Ikea and we got The Boyfriend's new desk set up and moved. More to come on all that later!
In the meanwhile, here are some more pics of the "before"
