Rijacki's Workshop: Craftroom Transformation: Introduction

My crafting space was cramped and messy and impossible to add anything more. I decided, as a birthday gift for myself, to make a change.

To keep the post size manageable, this is going to take a few posts to go through the tale of how I go from this above to the new craftspace (that I am still working on as I write this *laugh*)

We moved into our first "we own it (well, the bank does but we're not renting)" home 3 years ago. The house has 3 bedrooms: a master, a half master, and a small bedroom with brown walls. The half master is a large bedroom (with only the master larger) and has a private door to the bathroom that opens to the hallway and a large closet. Because of the bathroom access, we decided the half master should be the guest room since it would be nice for a guest not to have to walk through the open area to the bathroom. That left the smallest bedroom for my crafting space which wasn't the worst idea, at that time. We didn't do any painting when we moved in since we had to use all of our budget just to get the house and move in (we're in a rather expensive area for housing). But, I have hated the brown walls since day one, and the room seemed to get smaller and smaller every year.

My crafty journey in the last 7 years started with jewellery making. Straight ahead on the brown wood shelves is some of my bead stash. The black shelf to the right on the other wall mostly has 'made' items on it with boxes of cards I've created. On the brown shelves to the left of the beads is paper.

Circling around the table which is a peninsula to allow me access to the 'back' for a camera, more paper to the right and thinlit style dies ahead. In the right corner is resin stuff.

Circling around to my chair and the front of the desk (the side I faced while crafting), to the right, just out of shot, is the Big Shot, then the printer over the shelves with stamps, lots and lots of stamps. Ahead is inks and some of the glitters and rubs and pastes and stuff. Behind the chair is the Big Shot Plus and some of the steel rule dies, all of the large ones that can only be used with the Plus but a few others as well. On the floor between the short (and unstable) shelf with the Big Shot Plus and the shelving with the stamps are my "art" paper pads: watercolour, Bristol, Mi Tientes, etc.

Under the desk, my stencils and paints and sprays and stains and.. stuff.

To help me gain some more storage space, about a year ago my sweetie put in shelves into the closet and took off the doot. I never did get them organised. The tall shelf has more beads.

A top view shot of my desk with my ever shrinking space to actually do anything.

Another problem with this arrangement and room is the tripod for the camera. The smaller tripod that could fully fit on my desk broke. The larger one is too wide at its shortest setting to be on my desk, so I had to have one leg extending off the desk into the walkway from the door. It's a trip hazard, one which could be rather costly if it breaks the camera.

So, you see the issue. Yes, I could have tidied up and regained a modicum of space from a re-org, but even that wouldn't fit some of the fundamental problems from the small space and I really really really hated the brown paint. I finally brought it up in December and we were planning to do a bit of a gut to that room with a repaint and track and bracket shelves. But something was still bugging me.

While at a crafternoon with my dear friend, Betty, I was talking to her about it and mentioned the other room while immediately discarding it from consideration, as I had been doing for the past several months. But, while talking with her, I started questioning myself why I wasn't considering it. In the three years we've lived here, the guest room hadn't been "finished" but had become a catch-all for storing various stuff (including my sewing/costuming in plastic boxes). I talked to my sweetie and he had no objection to me taking over that room. And thus, the planning began.

My thinking was that it would be easier than packing up everything in my craftroom to paint and add shelving to the small room, we could just do a swap between the two rooms and include painting of the new space, too. Go on to Phase I (after I get it written) to see how that worked out.

But... a video tour of the two rooms.

First the craftroom that was:

And the guestroom that was:

Continues in Phase I - Painting.