I took over one end of my living room for felting/art and crafts a few years ago when I realised it’d never be used as a ‘conventional’ living room again, though to be fair, it’s never been what most people would call conventional anyway! Alhough it was better than what I’d had before, it wasn’t brilliant. I was putting something away last week, shoving things out of the way, leaning over boxes to get what I wanted and thought there must be a better way to organise the room so I’m not contorting myself all the time. I tried to picture things moved around, and had an idea of what I wanted, but thought I could do with something to help me visualise it better. I suppose I could have found some fancy site online or something, but went for simplicity: paper, pen and tape measure. I taped a couple of pieces of paper together to make a scale outline of my room, then measured everything in it and made cut-outs. Then I put them in the places where they were:
You can see there was space, but it wasn’t very functional, and since no one ever sits and watches telly, it seemed such a waste that there was a large amount between the couch and tv which was unusable. I started to move the outlines around to where I wanted them, and was quite surprised that they fit almost exactly how I imagined:
That was easy enough, I thought, so shifting a few boxes around should only take a few hours. Ha ha. About 3 and a half days more like it. But it works, much better than I thought actually. There’s a bigger area where the free space is ‘consolidated’. And it was nice having somewhere to sit and rest and flick through my plant books in between moving stuff. This is the table end, with my carder and some fibre boxes on the left, and wool and some more fibre boxes on the right:
These are the boxes on the right, I inherited the red box, it has wheels, I wish all the bottom ones did!:
And these are the book cases. I have another on the left, you can just see the edge of it and the corner of the couch (and yes, eagle eyed Brits, that is a 1960’s candlewick bedspread as a throw!) and the other book case actually has books on it. I bought the middle book case as a replacement for the little one on the end, but that soon filled up:
As you can see, I have a nice collection of shoe boxes. I could make it look neater and buy some more plastic storage tubs, but it seems so wasteful to recycle cardboard, and then buy plastic, so I’ll go for messy over tidy. It hardly matters when it’s all out across the floor anyway! The big yellow Dunlop box contains my tubs of threads and yarns scraps, filling up nicely for the 4th Quarter challenge. How do you organise your studio and felting supplies? Do you have any tips for being tidy or efficient?
