It's official ..... Home For Sale

It took months, but the house is finally ready to put on the market.  The biggest problem with getting the house ready to show was my work schedule.  Working 6 and 7 days a week doesn't leave much time for taking care of personal matters.  However I managed to get it done and now it is ready for the brokers open house on Thursday.  

We are supposed to get more rain this week, which is great, because that way my yard will look just as green as it does now (picture above taken this morning.)  Curb appeal is what my SIL and brother keep saying, that and the fact that the house has been remodeled within the last 6 years. 

The craft room was the first to be packed up and my SIL had to do it for me.  I kept getting bogged down in sorting and organizing instead of just packing.  I did manage to make selections for what I would not pack and that came out to be four 46.6 quart watertight containers.  They are currently in the craft room closet waiting for me to find a temporary place to live.   

Below is a picture of the craft room from a few weeks back.  This was the night before the movers came to pack up the big pieces and take them to storage.  The only thing left in the craft room is the table, everything else has been stored.  Weekend before last the walls were re-textured and painted to repair the holes from the shelving.  I will not be hanging any shelving in the new house until I am 100% sure it is staying put. 

Thats all for now.

Two Birds, One Card

Over at Less Is More the theme this week is "Anything Goes" in honor of  Chrissie's birthday.  First I'd like to wish Chrissie a Happy Birthday .... but since it's Saturday 9:30pm here and 3:30am Sunday in England, I think maybe it's a belated HB now.  :)

This little card is for LIM and The Card Concept which is a color challenge this week using aqua, white and lime.  I finally broke down and bought some sequins from Lawn Fawn and Verve and the color challenge was a perfect way to finally use them.  I think I went a bit overboard but ehhh ....

I used my current favorite little birds from Mama Elephant with a Memory Box HB die.  The lime is Luscious Lime from SU which retired long, long ago.  I have half a pack left and horde it like crazy; no scrap it too small.  The aqua blue is Bazzil and the birds are colored with Copics.  I put Wink of Stella on the birds and the word "birthday" so this really has a fun shimmer to it. 

Thank you for stopping by ~ Carole


A bit of fun here ....
After deciding what challenges I was going to attempt today and gathering the supplies, I walked over to my craft table and started to shove the last mess to the side so I could start on the card above.  Though I may not always post a card, at least once or twice a week I start a card with the intention of playing along.  Below is the disaster area known as my craft space.  This is my main working area where I keep everything but my cutting machine and dies.  There are easily half a dozen projects in this mess.  Either done, almost done, tossed aside because it was awful or tossed aside because I messed it up. 

The mess in the window seat is overflow from when I couldn't force another square inch of space from the craft table.

So before getting started today I took about an hour (maybe more) to clean my craft room!!!  I put everything away and it felt so nice to work in a clean space without stepping on containers and other junk that had no business being in that area. Ahhhhhhh  .....

 

CHAOS!!

The construction on the craft room and office has officially completed.  The paint is dry, the carpet in and all the wall shelving is up; now comes the hard part ..... putting it all back together. 

Looking into the craft room from the hallway

I really wanted to sort through everything and get it in perfect order before putting everything back in the units, but now I'm just hoping I can toss out some stuff as I go along and will figure out how to truly organize later ..... as in maybe over Christmas break in December.  :D  For now, everything is going back in the craft room in any open space I can find or make.  Very little is organized at this point with the exception of the new shelving unit behind the craft table. 

The office will definitely be done by this weekend.  It only required the books going back into the shelves and since I don't put books in any order (other than book series) it has been the easiest room to restore.  The only hold up in there is getting my larger books put up on those top shelves which requires climbing a ladder.  Between my vertigo and bad back, I don't climb ladders anymore so I have to depend on the kindness of my friends to come by and help.  Thankfully I have been blessed with some pretty awesome friends. 

Come Saturday, no matter what, I WILL be back in the craft room making a card .... any card ... even a one-layer-card.  It may take extra effort to find all the needed supplies since everything is just tossed willy-nilly in there, but I refuse to go another weekend without crafting in my own space.  So that will be my end goal for this week: make one card in remodeled craft room.  How hard can that be?  Really?  LOL  LOL   

I hope everyone is well and having a great spring. 

New shelving unit behind craft table: The large containers on the floor contain all my 12x12 papers and card stocks.  I still have to label them, but of them are Basic Grey DPs, one is SU! cardstock and the last one is SU! DP.  The small white boxes will eventually be covered with some bright DPs and will contain various embellishments.  Several have already been filled with SU! supplies.   

Looking across craft table at new wall unit.
PS - The painting of Captain Jack Sparrow was made for me by a wonderful girl at a fan site we both belong to.  It is truly a nice piece of art and will get the frame it deserves soon.  

SU! punch storage hanging on the back of the closet door.  I will mount another one on the wall next to the door unit. 

The card stock bins and jars are set, all other items need to be sorted through.  The bins hold my SU! card stock with the exception of two bins which have various weight non SU card stocks and one bin with all my Bazzill stock. 

The efla drawer unit used to run linear starting behind the craft table. With the removal of the closet I pushed it down and around the corner.  This leaves more room behind the craft table and makes the space seem much bigger than it really is.  I have some of those "floating" shelves to put up on the walls behind these units.   

Almost Done!!

The craft room is painted, the new light fixture is in, the window seat has been repaired and the carpet is on order. I was going to put in carpet tiles but when I checked them out they were very thin. Since I stand while creating, the thought of standing on a cement floor with a quarter inch of hard loop floor covering did not appeal to my bad back. So I went with a nice thick nylon carpet with a top grade thick pad under it. If its anything like what I put in my bedroom years ago, I'll probably want to sleep on it. LOL!! Carpet will go in by mid week and after that I can begin setting the room to rights again.    YAY!!

 My camera battery is getting low and I can't find the charger in all this chaos so I was not able to get more than a couple pictures before it gave out. :( This will be it for the updates until I find that charger.

This first picture is taken from the closet door looking back to where the actual construction was done. If you look at the floor near the edge of the door, those cut out areas of the carpet is where the office closet used to be.

This is a picture of the window seat that is in the craft room. It has been buried in junk for a year. I'm not sure what I will do with this little space, but it definitely will not be filled back up with junk. Also, the windows look dirty but it's actually the screens I have on my home. They are thick black insolated screens which help keep the house cool in summer and make looking out of the windows a bit iffy.

This picture was taken from the hallway looking back into the craft room.

Below are a couple of pictures of all my craft room suppies and furniture stacked up in the garage. Only the craft table remained in the room during the process since it was easy to move about. Sadly this isn't all of it; there is a very large stack of craft stuff in the master bedroom that could be ruined by the extreme heat of Texas if stored in the garage.

Progress Report

I was excited last night to see the closet was out and everything is ready to go up. So I thought it would be fun to take a few pictures of the craft room progress.

The first two pictures below were taken in the craft room with the closet area that was removed colored in pink. I took these pictures after everything was hauled into the garage. The craft table is small and light enough to be moved out of the way so it remains in the room. Thank goodness because there is not much room left in the garage for anything else; though I still have room for my car. If I remember, I'll take a picture of the garage when I get home this evening and add that to this post.

The first and last pictures are after the closet was removed; the top taken from the office looking into the craft room and the bottom one the reverse.

I selected the paint color last night; it's a very pale shade of yellow with a hint of green in it. Which I guess it not a true yellow and probably explains why I like it. :)

Still no decision on the floor covering, but if I want this project completed by the end of April I'll have to make up my mind before this weekend. At first I thought I'd just put it off until the summer, but the idea of having to move everything into the garage a second time kills my natural tendency towards procrastination. ;)

Thanks for popping in and I hope everyone is well.

Remodeling My Craft Room

Thought I should pop in and make a post to let people know that I'm here but not making cards right now. The reason being that my craft room is stacked up in the garage while I do some remodeling. I have a question at the end of this post, so please feel free to skip past my rambling if you wish and please take a minute to read the question and hopefully help me pick a color for the new room.



I'm working on the two small bedrooms in the back of the house which are my office and craft room. Between these two rooms is a closet that takes up a lot of space in my craft room and has (or I should say had) nothing but boxes of junk in it. By removing the closet I gain 4 feet of space (or just shy of) to the craft room and a nice large wall space that can be used for floor to ceiling book cases in the office. YAY!!

The floorplan above gives a general idea of what I'm having done. The drawing isn't to scale and in fact in the before picture the rooms look to be almost the same size; however that is not the case. The room I use as my office is very narrow and long at 8ft2in by 11ft. The craft room is currently 10ft by 9ft8in but once the remodel is finished it will be a really nice 10ft by 13ft5in.

The expected completion date on the project is April 20th; but thats only for the general contractor work and finished painting. Once he leaves the flooring will go in so I'm anticipating having the rooms ready to redress by the end of April.

If anyone has seen the pictures of my craft room before this remodel, then you know that my work table, shelves, walls and drawer units are white. I was thinking that instead of painting the walls white again, I'd add color. I thought I'd be daring and go with bold bright colors like Cool Caribbean; or Green Galore; maybe even Pixie Pink. Then of course I could go with Blushing Bride or Certainly Celery. If Island Indigo wasn't so dark that would be on the list to. ;)


QUESTION: If your craftroom furniture was all white; would you go with a bold color on the walls, or a pale color? The space will still be rather small and the lighting is limited to one window, one overhead light and two table lamps.

PS - I'm going with carpet floor tiles in the craft room so whatever the wall color is, I plan to match it in the floor coloring.

A work in progress

The picture to the left is the reason I have been MIA for a month. My craft room make-over has taken a lot of my free time for many weeks, heck months actually, and I have to admit, I am so very pleased with how well it is coming along. I am now to the point where I can craft again and just organize when the mood hits me.

I promised a friend that has listened to me go on and on about this room for the last few months, that I would post pictures before she leaves on vacation today. So that is why I am posting before the room is completely done. Also, please forgive the poor quality of the pictures. I'm still getting used to this new camera and can't seem to get the hang of it. The thing with HiDef cameras is you have to have a very, VERY steady hand .... which is clearly something I don't have. LOL

Anyway on to the room. The first picture (above) was taken standing in the doorway looking in. The mess behind the desk is a window seat that has my son's junk on the bottom and various craft storage containers on top. I plan to tackle this mess over the weekend. All the necessary furniture is in place and everything that was once scattered all over my house is now in this room. It may not be in its final place yet, but I'm hoping by the end of August to have the last of the organization done.

These are the shelves I had been waiting for. They are perfect and by perfect I mean storage and size wise. There is less than half an inch between closet door and left edge; and just shy of an inch on the right edge and the main door. The unit is 55" tall with the space on the inner shelves slightly less than 12". Not much on this shelf other than the jars and SU card stock bins and surplus is in its final place. I need to determine what I want on the Elfa wall unit before I can finalize this one. The big bag of Martha Stewart punches will go on metal shelves next to the hanging wall unit eventually.



These next two are of the shelves on the craft table. The Bazzill card stock storage will remain where it is, I like it there. However the items in the shelves on the side may or may not stay put. For now it works.





Here is another shot of the short wall with all the Elfa storage (the Container Store just loves seeing me pull up) and a few labels to show how I have organized some of it. The best thing about the lower units is I can switch things around anytime I get the urge. Other than the narrow units in the center, all the drawers on the outer units can be rearranged. For the most part, I have the labeled drawers where I want them. Oh and that Cricut over in the junk stack; never been used; can't figure that thing out to save my life. Of course I think something like the Cricut requires patience, and I'm in the negative on that score. LOL




This one is obvious; my stamp holder. The old style full size craft pads are in the lower unit and the regular SU! stamp pads in the upper. There are a dozen or so colors that I have, but rarely use, tucked into the lower unit as well. I have my Distress pads stacked on the top of the lower unit.



This is a shot standing in the corner by the closet shooting into the opposite corner. The mesh shoe hanging thingie holds my old style SU! punches and a few other types. I'm not sure if I will keep this once I get the metal shelves on the wall next to the Elfa unit, but for now its a great fit.





This is how I store my Spellbinder and other dies (excluding Verve). These fabulous folders are magnetic and very sturdy. I have them sorted by shapes or style; or by company. I haven't figured out a good labeling system yet so I have to pull the books out of the bin partway so I can see the small sticky notes on the front to determine what is inside. I think I will number the edges and then keep an excel file for look up. That’s the plan for now anyway. :)


This is all my surplus SU and Bazzill card stock. Off to the side is the last of the Cool Caribbean and Soft Sky; two of my all time favorite colors SU has ever produced. I tend to stock up on the In Colors if I really like them knowing they will sadly never return. Kiwi was another In color that I loved and am sadly down to my last two packs. :(


These fabulous containers are made by ZIA and were purchased at The Container Store. I LOVE them. They hold the SU! cling stamps perfectly. They are currently sitting on the workspace top, but will go up on the shelves above once I get a row of those canvas bins sorted and reassigned.