Over the weekend and during the week last week the boy and I dismantled the closet in my office, painted and hung new shelving. Prompted by a request from me to hang a decorative shelf over my sewing machine table to put some of my thread the boy suggested we reorganize the closet first and see how that affected the amount of stuff out and about in the office. Can you tell he’s a process engineer with tasks like making work areas more productive and tools readily available?

Here’s a shot of the closet while we were taking everything out of it. For some reason I always forget to take true before pictures as it doesn’t occur to me to take one until I am in the middle of working on something.

My brother, the boy and I picked out a happy green color for the  closet interior. I don’t plan to put both doors back up and I wanted a nice color as a backdrop. It may or may not be kind of close to Ravelry green. Here’s a shot of the painting work.

Lastly, we have shots of the closet once I got almost everything put back in to it. I still have to go through a few more stacks waiting in the office. Then I can show you the area with the sewing tables and how they turned out. I am also hoping to find a new sewing table for my Brother machine when garage sale season is upon us.

View from the office into the closet:

View of the Left wall, see if you can spot the Sticks N Stitches door prizes.

The back wall of the closet, that whole top shelf is empty so there is definitely room to grow. I’ve also stashed some fiber in here that was out on the bookcase in the office, hopefully it won’t get so dusty.

This closet is located above our stairs so I have this awesome stair step section. We’re toying with the idea of turning the second step into a little reading nook by putting pillows and other soft cushy items up there.

So as you can see we put in adjustable shelving and we also hit up a sale on plastic storage bins at Home Depot. The two large plastic carts on the bottom came out of my sewing area. Some of the smaller bins are project bins for specific sewing projects so I can just grab them and go if I want to sew at a friend’s house or in the basement. I also have all my fabric in bins and easily search-able. I love that I still have room to grow, and I am going to try not to fill that up too fast. All in all, it was definitely worth the money and the labour because it just makes me happy every time I look over and see my closet. I am so glad we finally took the time to do this because now I can find everything and my office is so clean!

For my 4th of July four day weekend we transformed this sadly purple room into a vibrant happy yellow room. This room was one of the two rooms I was less than thrilled with when we bought this house over 2 yr ago. you can see how pressing the matter was to get it remedied. The number one priority was the 1/2 bathroom on the main level and then updating this room to look like someone older than 10 lives in it.

So here’s the yellow! (Oh and it’s brighter and cheerier in person)

Yellow room of happiness

Yellow room of happiness

And some before pictures. I happen to think the Lendrum wheel and the Christmas tree still look nice!

Purple room at Christmas time

Purple room with new Lendrum wheel.

Today we slept in to make up for all of the running around we’ve been doing this week. (And all of the eating!) Then we went and had lunch with a dear friend and got awesome news. Let’s just say I have more fun knitting in store. When we got home we set to work putting Christmas decorations around the house. I got the fake tree done upstairs while the boy put the lights outside. We went to put all our candles in the window and then realized that all the bulbs we bought at the end of the season last year don’t fit. Woops! It was good to at least get a few of the decorations around. The boy said he won’t be turning on any of our outside lights until December, though. I guess I can wait the two days. We’ll get a live tree for downstairs in a couple weeks and finish getting the rest of decorations around then.

So during dinner the boy and I were discussing what to tackle next and he decided we should spend a couple of hours working on the kitchen. I am sure this wasn’t at all related to the fact that yesterday I took all of the pots and pans out of the cupboards and put them on the dining room table until I had time to figure out how else to arrange them. We moved our cutting boards to a new cabinet in an effort to create a new space for my stoneware. Sadly the stone ware is kind of big and didn’t fit neatly into that space.

Cutting board and spice cabinet

Then we moved all the cookbooks out of a cupboard and into a holding spot (we wouldn’t mind a bookcase for the kitchen for Christmas *hint* *hint*) to free up space for small appliances.While bringing up the appliances from the basement I found an electric skillet we got from my grandmother’s house. I went to open it and as the dust flew off the packing tape I had this feeling it hadn’t been opened before. Getting into the contents led me believe that I was right in that assumption. Also it is the tiniest little wee electric skillet. It cracks me up.

Small Appliance cupboard - the skillet is on the top left.

Lastly the boy determined the precise size to cut down some of the leftover MDF we have to make a third shelf in our island to house the glass lids we have for our Guardian Service. Now we’ll be able to better store those without worrying about them breaking. It feels like we got a lot done and the kitchen is looking great.

There are several things still on the dining room table waiting for temporary homes. I say temporary homes because we’ve decided at some point in the next year or so to invest in a sideboard for our dining room. We’ll be able to use it to store china, serving platters, linens, potentially the stone ware and it’ll be great space for food when we host those big holiday gatherings.

Temporarily homeless items.