The LONG awaited STUDIO TRANSFORMATION post!! Part III

On to day 2!!

Day 2 -- The Light at the end of the tunnel!!

It was all I could do to convince myself that I *wanted* to go back into the disaster area on the morning of day 2. But, by the time I went to bed that night, I could see the creative place I had been envisioning this whole time beginning to emerge from the rubble.
I could finally see the floor!!! It was PHENOMINAL!! There was still a TON of work to do (including putting up that massive table you see in the pictures :D) But the end was so much closer than the beginning, and I could almost taste it.


I decided that I wanted to put all of my sewing machines onto one table so that they weren't all over the place (and so that the girls would have a desk to do their homework on.) But first I had to clean off the table for them to go on (Yes, their was a table underneath all that crap.)

(See!! A Table!! LOL)
Anyway, by the end of day 2, I still had some work to do and I needed to run to the hardware store to get bolts and nuts and stuff to set up the big table I intended to use for my art stuff (This table had taken up residence in my hallway for about a year or so in pieces waiting for me to get the studio put together and get it set up.)
I was actually breathing a bit easier when I went to bed that night 'cuz I was starting to feel like I was accomplishing something great :D

The LONG awaited STUDIO TRANSFORMATION post!! Part II

(That last one was kinda long and I thought it might be better to break it up into a couple posts, covering each of the 3 days separately :D)

Day 1 -- What a NIGHTMARE!!!
It started out okay, I guess. I originally had thought that if I moved everything out of the back corner of the room and then cleaned my way towards the door it would make much more sense. However, what I didn't factor in was the sheer amount of crap I was going to be throwing away, the fact that I still needed to be able to get out the door to throw said crap away, or the fact that there were things in that room that I couldn't throw away if I wanted to (Namely all the junk that the Man Child that I call my husband just stuffed into there after he lost his job the last time ~ He drives a truck, so when he cleaned out his truck he just brought all the crap home and shoved it in the room. When he started driving again, he didn't take it all back out with him. His reasoning -- this new truck is smaller than his old one was. BOO-freakin'-HOO!)
At the end of the first day, the room actually looked WORSE than it did before I began. I seriously began questioning if I had made the right choice in cleaning it out, or if I should have just left well enough alone.

Again, the FABULOUSNESS that is A4A was there to talk me down from the ledge. ;)
The corner I started in was messier than when I started, the fabric pile on the floor in front of the Wall O' Fabric was higher than when I started, and the pathway to the door was non-existent at this point.


At this point, I just shrugged my shoulders, turned out the light, and went to bed.

The LONG awaited STUDIO TRANSFORMATION post!!

If you say that with a slightly deep, echo-y voice and add the sound "Ahhhhhhhh" like they do in the movies, it makes it all much better :D

A few months ago, I posted about cleaning out my studio (Well, at that time it was just a dining room with not a whole lot of potential. However, I did have hope :D ) Then I *swore* that I would post pics and illustrate the process for you. But I never quite managed to have enough hours in a day to get it done (yes, it does take me a long time to figure out how to do all this stuff. I am NOT technologically inclined.)
Well, guess what Peeps!!?!??! I FINALLY have some time on my hands and will be glad to introduce you to my studio as it was a couple of months ago :D (I'm trying something a little different here with the whole photo thing, so hopefully it works. If not, I will have to go back to the ol' drawing board.)

A little background for ya here, we moved into a duplex about 3 yrs ago that had what the landlord calls a 'dining room'. Originally, we had intended to use it as a third bedroom, but found that the fact that there was no closet in it made it a bit inconvenient for whom ever was stuck in it (oh yeah, that and the room itself has no door. Not that we ever close the doors, but it is nice for a bedroom to have a door.) So we just used it to store junk er, stuff in. I also used it as a sewing room (I like to make clothes and collect fabric. I needed a place to do that. Voila, dining room = perfect.)
After 3 yrs or so of storing stuff (and by 'storing stuff' I mean taking anything that didn't have a place to be or junk that we didn't need/want/use any more and shoving it into the room to be dealt with at a later time) things had gotten a bit, shall we say, out of hand. And it looked something like this...

(Note that the mess LITERALLY comes clear to the doorway, so in order to get into the room, you have to step over stuff and hope that you have L~O~N~G enough legs to find the floor on the other side. I didn't take any pics of this phenominon or of the mounds of fabric on the floor in front of my 'Wall O' Fabric')
This is the Wall O' Fabric...

If you look closely in the dim light you can kinda see the floor in the background. It was covered with crap stuff just like the rest of the room was.
I decided that I was going to clean it out and turn it into the studio I had always intended it to be no matter what it took (If I had known what I was in for when I started, I *might* rather have just shacked myself up on the couch and watched TV for the next 3 days LOL)

I figured that I would need serious encouragement for this one, so I enlisted the help of my friends at A4A for some hand holding moral support and reassurance that this would all be worth it in the end. (LOVE it there!! They are FANTASTIC people. You should check it out, if you haven't already. :D ) And then I braved the abyss...