Wednesday, January 02, 2013

Moving In

It's been a busy few weeks, what with Christmas preparations and celebrations, and moving my studio. I've been working on the moving for at least two weeks and it's nearly complete. I haven't moved my quilts over yet because the storage racks have yet to be built, but that will happen real soon now. Most everything else has made the trip, and I have the sore knees to prove it.  Six steps up from the basement, out the back door, in the studio door, and up 15 steps, carrying boxes and stuff. Wow, do I have a lot of stuff.


These cabinets are for the wet studio area. I filled them up with paints, dyes, brushes, measuring cups, chemicals, syringes. I thought I would have enough room to also store all the stamps and other marking tools in these cabinets also, but that was a delusion. That stuff filled up two rolling metal basket carts.


Inside the larger closet. The builders left the roll ends of tyvek, and I used it to cover part of the walls. There was heavy aluminum foil covering the insulation and the tyvek will prevent me accidentally punching a hole in that when moving stuff around. Notice the nice shelves at the far end, courtesy of my dear husband. Behind the rolling carts are boxes with seldom used stuff. I need to make a map of where I've stashed things because I've already spent time trying to find stuff because I can't remember where I put it.


The view from the top of the stairs.


Same view, but now the work tables and sewing table are in place. I've ordered one more table.


The fabric stash.


Home Depot (where we have spent a lot of time and money lately) has these plastic shelves that are quite inexpensive, very easy to assemble, easy to move around (while not holding anything), and will hold a remarkable amount of stuff. They come in various sizes. There is a white one tucked into the corner in the previous picture, and then I also bought this one. This is going to be the spot where I dump stuff. Previously the only place I could do that was on my work surface, and it rapidly became so cluttered I was always moving stuff around  to open up enough area to work. Now there is a dedicated space.

I covered four 4x8 insulation boards with white fleece and put them on the long wall. This is a huge amount of design wall space and right now it's giving me artist block. I need to put something on it. Yesterday I made curtains for the windows that face the street, as I was feeling rather exposed up there. And I have to figure out the  "work flow" - where to put the things I use so that they are close to where I use them. In the basement studio, everything was very close at hand since the space was pretty confined. Now, everything is more spread out and I don't want to spend too much time and too many steps to find my rulers and rotary cutters. It's a very nice problem to have.