Changing Rooms

Goodness me, a week of school over already?

It feels like it's whipped by and what's worse is I haven't had a chance to get back to my normal routine and attempt to catch up with a summer's worth of backlog.

Instead I've spent most of my week in Madam's room surrounded by paint cans and getting covered with a thousand specks of roller debris in an attempt to be ready for wallpapering at the weekend.  But that's only one of the renovation projects we've got on the go at the moment.  We're having a bit of a shuffle around you see and the designated use of some rooms is due for a change.

I don't know if I've really mentioned it before here but in our garden we have a lovely little room.  Not really a shed or summerhouse but not a brick built structure either.  It's one of these in fact. Originally, it was an office space for Hubs when he used to work at home full time.  It worked perfectly.  He had  space and quiet from the (then) noisy toddler and we could avoid hearing his lengthy work calls and the thud, thud, thud of the pacing back and forth while he made them.  He can't stay still when he talks on the phone, funny man.

Over the years though, as his job has changed we've started using this outside room less and less.  I kept meaning to come up and catch the spring sun there, conservatory style, but never did.  We set up the Playstation to make a 'games room' but it got little use.  In the end it became a bit of a office/dumping ground with a games console in.  A bit of a waste.

Since the whole moving house thing is now off we've been thinking about how to make what we've got work a little better for us and it always been a waste to not make better use of this outside space.  We've talked before about me moving my crafty stuff out there before but I've always resisted.  It's just so much easier for me to be set up in the house.  I have projects and things scattered all over our little home to be honest and I'm always nipping up to my craft room of an evening to fetch something.  If there's a delivery, I'm there to receive it.  The wifi isn't too great by the time you get to the end of the garden either.  But...

The time has come to review that decision.  It's a great space, a good 4 x 2.5 m worth of lovely roomy room, bigger than my current craft room, and we need to use it wisely.  If my craft room goes alfresco, we free up a room in the house which would be much more valuable to us.  Hubs still does the odd day at home, so we'll keep a desk in there but it can be a combined home office too.  A place to store the printer and ink cartridges, file the odds and ends of paperwork and so on.  What's more, we'll also have some space left over in that room.  So this time, it feels right.

It's funny but it feels like quite a big deal, even this small change, this small re-location and but I think it's going to be good thing.  Not moving has left us with an urge for that feeling of fresh start that we missed out on and this feels like a very suitable substitute.  I thought perhaps you might like to follow along with me on this little shuffle of ours?

I'm not all finished and ready for the big reveal yet, but hopefully that'll be soon.  In the meantime though, here's what's happened so far....

Up to now the room the decoration in this new room has a bit of a garden theme, to suit its exterior location and to attempt to make it a lovely place to come and sit, even though I never did end up sitting.  So before anything else happened everything got a good coating of white paint.  I'm not much of a one for the all white walls and no colour minimalist style, I have far too much clutter to pull that off but I want to be able to take lots of photos up here and you can't beat white for maximising the light.

The school holidays had started by this time, so I had a helper to get the job done.  I did fear how many coats it would take to get everything nicely covered but I'm happy it didn't take us long.  The next task was lugging all the furniture down the house stairs, up the garden steps and across the lawn.  That was fun!

We did it though and after the main heavy lifting was out of the way it was time for the mixed pleasure of putting all the actual stuff away again.  We've been trying to rationalise everything as we go, we still have way too much stuff and we want to make sure that what we are choosing to keep and store is worth is place.  I love sorting and organizing so I enjoy this part but there is a lot of stuff and it takes a long time of go through everything.  I even took photos of my old room so I could unpack my shelves and re-stack as efficiently as possible.  A little over the top I know, but it did save me a lot of time, so worth it to my mind.

I'm making good progress though. The holidays set me back of course and there's been some trips to Ikea in the meantime so there's some construction on the horizon before I'm done, but it's really starting to take shape now and feel like a wonderful new crafty space and that's exciting.

I can't wait to share it with you soon.

S x

♥

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