A Retrospective 5.The Dining Room, 2007 to (early) 2015

To celebrate my blog's eighth anniversary, we're taking a tour through time and looking at the changes I've made to our house over the years. This is the fifth in the series. The last areas to be featured were the Bedrooms, 2007-2014. If you'd like to start at the beginning, go here: The Front and Back Yards, 2007-2014. You can also catch all the retrospective posts under the Prairie Home Tour tab.

This room has been known by many names. The Office. The Scraproom (or, as it is labeled here on the blog, my "creative space.") Recently, I took to calling it "the study." But that just felt pretentious--especially as I decluttered 80 per cent of the books out of here earlier this year!

So. Let's call it the dining room--which it is about three times a year.

The rest of the year it is my sanctuary, my haven.

It wasn't always that way! In fact, it started out quite the opposite.

These posts are quite long, so click through to read through, thanks!

Project 21: Hang the Paper Cutter.

This was supposed to be another embarrassingly easy one.

When I first got the idea of hanging my paper cutter, back in February while taking the creative space workshop,  I had no idea how I was going to do it.

When I re-wrote my project list for the anti-procrastination project, I allotted it two hours. Most of that was for researching how to hang it.

I sat down with the computer and typed in some search terms, like "hang paper cutter" and got all sorts of unrelated and irrelevant articles. The same thing happened on Pinterest. It was a good thing that rabbit hole wasn't too deep.

So, I decided to take a look at the paper cutter itself and see what it suggested to me.

It suggested a narrow block of wood for the lip to rest upon.

I went down to my husband's newly built shelves and organized wood pile and found what I needed immediately.

I decided to paint it the same colour as the wall. I found the paint (and the brushes!) easily because of our newly re-organized basement.

I did have to go out and purchase more command adhesive in order to put it on the wall. The plan was to fasten one of the command velcro strips to the wood and the other to the wall.

It was going to be so easy-- and I was happy thinking I did not have to continue to make Swiss cheese out of my walls.

And that should have been that.

Except the Velcro on the command strip gave way.

Twice.

So, in the end, and because I was determined to have a post for today, I didn't say rude things and walk away (well, half that statement is true). No, I used the drill, wall anchors, screws and a level and fastened a block of wood to the wall.

My five minute project took about a half hour.

Here is where I kept the paper cutter. On the floor between the end of my desk and the wall.

sorry you had to see that.

This is where I am keeping it now.

Much, much better.

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie....

Goal:

One cleared out cubby in the Expedit for something Stacy Julian calls Storage Binders. They are a crucial part of the photo handling system I am learning in Finding Photo Freedom.

In order to clear out a cubby, though, a great many things had to happen.

First, to take books off the shelves and sort and choose which ones to sell where, I needed to get down to the basement. I have other books from previous efforts of decluttering my books and they all needed to be sorted.

But before that could happen, I had to be able to get to them and to my sorting surface.

But I couldn't.

They were here, in my son's "video games room."

So, I had to move him out.

In order to move him out, we needed to sell this lat pull down machine over in the corner of the basement by the water heater and furnace:

Got that?

Move the books, move the boy, move out the exercise machine.

We thought we had a buyer for the exercise machine, so we dismantled it.

When he failed to show up to collect it, I decided to store it disassembled and set up the new room anyway. My son helped me and we got it done on the weekend.

That left the former video game "room." It was still completely unusable. (Sorry, I didn't stop to take a picture.)

I stacked everything in the room over to one side. I wanted to take a beauty shot of the recumbant bike so we can sell that too. I really dislike using it.

Then, I could get to work.

I started by piling. I sorted the boxes into boxes of books to sell and boxes of memorabilia. I set up a small kitchen table on loan from my Mom and put the memorabilia boxes on it.

 

Then, on the table where the TV had been, I started sorting the boxes of books I'd already collected from around the house last year. (A local second hand bookstore which specialised in children's books went out of business in the fall. I need to find another good home for them.)

(The white dresser used to be where the black shelves are now.)

Once I had those in piles, and not before, I was able to go upstairs and choose a few things to get rid of and shuffle things about until I had enough space to clear out a cubby. (I added them to their appropriate piles on the table in the basement.)

Ta Da!

Ok, so technically, it isn't empty. That's my cutting mat. But no books. It's empty of books. The cutting mat doesn't count. Besides, it's a scrapbooking tool.

Hooray!

You know, I probably could have cleared out a cubby at any point: physically. I could have just taken the contents and piled them somewhere, anywhere. I really didn't have to rearrange about a third of the basement.

But mentally, that was impossible. I used to just throw things down there willy-nilly to "deal with it later." But I have spent enough time on marathon clean up sessions down there that I just can't do it anymore. In fact, it didn't even occur to me I could have done that until I was writing this post!

That's progress, folks! That's real progress for this procrastinating recovering hoarder.

And so here we have it. My reward. My first storage binder, all put away in its proper spot.

I will make a label for it when I figure out what colour I want to make it.

(Now to get binders for more? I have what I need. Yep. In the basement. That's a whole 'nother decluttering project!)

 

 

 

Linking to the inestimable Jules and the folks who make up the William Morris project every Thursday at Pancakes and French Fries because if creating that cleared out cubby wasn't a cascade of beautiful and useful, then I don't know what is!

 

PS: Both the lat pull down machine and the recumbant bike have been sold and removed. Yes! 

My Creative Space: Inspiration

I've been pinning inspiration photos of craft spaces and sewing rooms and scrap rooms and studios like mad for the past few months.

When I went to identify what I liked about those spaces, however, to identify what was attractive to me and made me want to create, I found the cupboard bare.

I didn't actually pin beautiful, heart quickening spaces.

This was the sort of thing I was pinning:

Source: Scrappin Cricut

 

Neat, beautifully organized, highly functional, and an efficient use of space. But it doesn't make my heart sing.

This does:

source: My Home Ideas

and this:

source: Atlanta Homes Magazine

 

I don't know why, but this nearly made me cry. (I think I was up past my bed-time):

 

 

source: Vosgesparis

 

I think I had such a strong reaction just because it is so obviously a space designed for creativity--for the openess and clarity of mind one needs to bring to the process--not the stuff, not the things--but the essence, the spirit.

 

 

 

 

source: Think Decor

 

 

I am somewhat surprised by the lack of colour in these spaces, but then again, scrap booking,which is my current major hobby is consumed with colour--at least for me. So having a creative space which emphasizes textures and balances light and dark elements as exquisitly as these do, seems natural to me.

 

 

Here are my takeaways:

 

1) Large work surface. Huge table--not a desk.

 

2) Tons of natural light, please!

 

3) Materials: natural wood. Painted wood. Distressed finishes. A little bit of metal. Wicker. Interesting task lights. Kind of industrial turn of the century-factory-like looking.

 

4) The containers match. There's an extreme cohesiveness to everything on display.

 

5) There's an open, airy feel in all these images. Ther's a fair bit of white space--and in all these spaces it is, actually, white!

 

 





My Creative Space

One of my goals this year is to awaken my long dormant creativity. I am taking two classes this month to help me along. (I would not have chosen to take these classes at the same time, but that's when they were available!)

The first is Photo Freedom taught by Stacy Julian from Big Picture Classes. Yikes! Is that going to be a ton of work! The second is Organize Your Creative Space by Aby Garvey from Simplify101.

My creative space is my dining room/home office. This room:

Photo from 2011

 

Most of my scrapbooking supplies are actually in the Expedit.

Photo taken today.

A few more are downstairs in the basement. They're primarily in (and on!) this dresser and these two old stacked pine IKEA units.

There are also different scrapbook projects in the cases on the shelves to the right of the table. (Under that green cloth is my miniature house project I haven't seen in 16 years!)

 

(I took this photo last year after working on it for a month last year. Shortly after I set up this space to work, my husband and my son turned it into a place to play video games. This is how it looks today! I need to spend some time down here and create a better set up.)

 

 

When I last took a scrapbooking class--and thus knew I'd be scrapping for ten weeks or so--I set up my dining room like this:

 

Everything right within reach. It worked really well.

Of course, this is all cleaned up! This is how things really looked at Christmas while I was putting together the scrapbook calendar:

My problem is, I can't leave the room set up to scrapbook all the time. Never mind the chaos, I need this room for many other things as well.

For example, in my photo Freedom class, I'll be sorting photographs on the table:

For a while, it seems!

So, the challenge for me will be how to figure out how to do scrapbook pages in a casual way, a way that doesn't involve radically changing the dining room but still lets me get a page done now and then.

That would make me happy.