Thursday, September 6, 2012

Operation "Studio Overhaul" continues!

I've been moving things back and forth..  and back and forth again in the Studio room again today.  I've come up with a great idea for shelf placement in the largest part of the mission - which is to maximize storage space for the WIDE variety of supplies and projects I have going on.  Unfortunately I'm shot one set of holes in my shelving units, so I'll have to break out the drill (or ask hubby to do it - heehee) and drill some more peg holes to scoot the shelves higher up.  When all the drill dust has cleared, I'll actually have another skinny shelf, just the perfect height to slide in my packs of cardstock and papers - which never seem to quite fit anywhere else and end up piled here and there so that I can't find the ones I'm looking for.

Is it sad that this makes me happy?  Hark!  A shelf to keep my papers on!:



I've also been measuring the shelves and my sample storage options.  A while back we had bought one each of a couple different plastic drawer units; now I've come up with the configuration that I want to use them in. I do wish I could use something nicer than the cheap plastic drawers, but I suppose that can come later - you know, say after the Studio starts to support itself and I can invest in fancier storage options!

My fancy, handy dandy layout illustration, lest I forget what I was going for:



The trouble with trying to get all of the shelves "just so" is that all of the items normally on said shelves have to be scattered around to other places while I jockey the shelves up and down.

Sooo...  the epic mess continues.


Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Studio Overhaul!

Well, once again I decided to do a massive overhaul of the Studio room.  I had thought about taking some "before" pictures, but it was really bad, so I declined.  (ha!)  As with many large projects, at the moment it looks worse than when I started, but there is progress being made!  It was a mess when I started, but now...  Oh my...



There was a lot going on in the room, it was part library, part plant nursery, part creative space, part storage room.  I've been keeping way too much in there and no wonder it was getting hard to go down to the actual Studio and get focused on creating new items!  

First step was to move out all of the books and bring them up to the bookshelf in our office, swapping them for straggling supplies and projects that were lingering on the shelves up here.  I organized all of my books by subject and ended up with a pretty decent little library setup.



Then I packed up some of my model horse collection.  Did I mention that the room was ALSO being used to display a few different collections of things?  Just not going to work when I need more room for organizing supplies and so on.  So into a storage tote some of my collection went.

Basically the end result of yesterday's labors is that all of the books were moved, some unneeded things were packed up, and I started adding shelves to the units in the room, allowing for better use of space.  I'm pretty happy with how that is turning out, as I have a bunch of smaller items that were taking up entire large shelf spots.  No more!:


There's a glimpse of what I'm shooting for; better storage and accessibility of my supplies and projects.

Still needing to be addressed is the "plant nursery" section of the room:




We only have a couple of windows in the house that get sunlight, this is one of them.  This is also the only room with a sunny windowthat can be closed off from her:


The resident plant-eating cat.  She has thwarted previous attempts to protect the plants and managed to make salads of plants that are supposed to be poisonous, without any affect.  She is the fuzzy bane of houseplants in our home!  Hence most of the plants now being squirreled away in the Studio room.

Also wanting to get in on the action is the junior plant eater, our rescued barn kitten.


So, I made quite a bit of progress yesterday, but still have a LONG way to go.  Once I finally get everything squared away, then comes the task of actually re-organizing all of my supplies and then labeling each drawer/container so I can reliably FIND things when it's time to create!