A Family of Three

Last Saturday our family multiplied by 50%... by number, but not size.

Welcome our newest little member of the family. His name is Champ.

He sits on Hubby's computer desk so we can enjoy his company.

House Organizing- Sewing Room

I have read in many places that one way to help you get motivated to organize you should have a friend help. My house has a lot of work that needs to be done, and I didn't feel comfortable bothering a friend, so I decided to ask my niece instead. Usually when I ask her to help me clean for pay she doesn't want to do it. This time I started by agreeing to give her one of my of toys in exchange for helping me go through my old toys. Amazingly she jumped at the opportunity. As we were working I asked her if she would come and help me one day a week every week until school starts. She agreed because she liked the one on one time she gets with me, (plus the monetary benefits). When returning her home her younger sister asked if she could come too, so now I have two afternoons a week where I will have one of my nieces to help me.

Last week niece 1 helped me go through my old toys and separate them into boxes to get ready for a garage sale. This week she helped me rearrange my sewing room. Even though she doesn't know exactly what to do, having someone there to talk to helps me stay on task and not get to bored.

We put boxes of fabric that were stacked haphazardly behind the door in the closest, and moved the bookshelf and one set of drawers behind the door. Now I have room where the shelves used to be to put the desk I refinished.

I won't go into depth about everything else I did to reorganize, but ever drawer got pulled out, and similar things got put together. There is no longer spools of thread in 10 different places, or beads in 3 different drawers. It's nice to have everything organized and know where it all is. I am also working on organizing all my papers in the binders on the shelves. Soon they will all be white and labeled to make it easier to find things.

Before, such a mess

After:
I moved the drawers that were under the table behind the door. I moved fabric around and got more in the drawers under the table and put some in the black boxes.

The little drawers hold thread, sewing machine supplies, serger suplies, pins, needles, and all the different cutting supplies that I have.

I got the magnet board, magnetic containers, bar and cups at Ikea. The hold scrap booking supplies, pens, markers, and paper scissors. All of my 8 1/2 x 11 paper is in the drawers as well as stamps, stickers, things to be scrap booked, and embellishments. My big paper won't fit in the drawers so it's in the plastic box to the left of my desk.

This is the area that is behind the door. The drawers hold beads, patterns, serger thread, lace tools, and fabric for projects that are half way done.

Here's just a fun picture of my sewing books.

It's nice having my sewing room all organized. I do need to get more drawers and organize the rest of my fabric, as well as organizing the closet. I also want to at some point put shelves on the walls above my desk to hold my paper cutter and spiral binder. I also found a pegboard in my basement that I'm going to paint and hang on the wall so I can hang my thread and other things on it. Someday I would also like to get rid of the green shag carpet, and get a carpet that pins and needles can't hide in as easily.

I love having an area for my sewing!

Refinished Desk

Another piece of furniture that was left in my house when I moved in was a desk. At first I put it in my sewing room and set my sewing machine on it. The problem with this was that it's not a very big desk so there wasn't much room for the fabric to stay on the desk. After receiving a sewing table from my mother-in-law I moved the desk upstairs to put next to my husbands desk so I'd have a place to put my laptop. As I've been going through organizing my house I decided that I needed to put all of my scrap booking stuff in one place, and a good place would be my sewing room. The only problem was there was no desk in there to work on scrap booking. Two months ago I found a desk that I liked at a garage sale It was in good condition and was a decent price to I bought. The new desk was to big for my sewing room so We rearranged our desks upstairs, and the little desk was headed back down to my sewing room. Before It headed down though, it got a makeover.

It started out like this:

And  ended up like this:

Red was not the view I had to begin with. I had planned at first to paint the bottom white, and then to sand and restain the top. I got the white done and it just didn't look right. Taylor agreed with me and he suggested I paint it red instead. I went back to the store and got more paint. Having the desk be red adds a bit of color to my boring green and brown room. Maybe I should start trusting Taylor more on color choices...