Organization. Love it. Everything should have a place and be in its place. Somehow, in my home this is a constant battle. One reason (or is this an excuse?) is it takes me a long time to get to know a space. I need to live in and use a space to get a sense of how I use it and where things should be located. This is especially true in my studio.
In my single days, my living quarters tended to be oddly shaped attic apartments with large, open plans. I divided up the non-bedroom, non-kitchen room into an office nook, living room area, and the studio got the majority of the floor space. An office shoehorned into a tiny area in a big room doesn't feel cramped while the same configuration in a tiny room does. I don't like walls and I don't like being hemmed in.
Give me a square room with a door and some windows and I'm at a loss. I like the funky nooks and crannies around chimneys and under eaves. They define where furniture should live. A square room offers no hints or suggestions. And small rooms, as opposed to small areas in big rooms, offer little flexibility. In my attic apartments the entire set-up could be reworked to accommodate nearly anything. Framing an oversized painting? Let it spill over into the living room area. Get a new couch, reconfigure to make it fit.
All this is prelude to my current task at hand. Organize my studio. Or is it a sewing room? When the owners of the farm house we rent put on an addition, they reused the old kitchen cabinets and counter top to create a sewing room. It's a small room (7x9 with one door and one large window), but, I hope, functional. I have been using it to sew, but it is a royal mess. When moving in this summer I unpacked all my studio supplies - the majority of which are not sewing related - and stowed them in the cabinets without rhyme nor reason. And there they sit. And multiply.
Since I don't know where anything is, every new project creates an explosion. Chaos reigns while I move stuff around trying to find the one small item I need. Enough. Time to organize.
I did manage to wash all 80 pounds of upholstery fabric scraps that fill a bunch of plastic tubs.
And after a bit of work, EUREKA! We have a floor!
Getting there...
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