Canada Kate

I've decided to take the plunge. I'm tired of having quilting stuff in my kitchen, living room, and dining room. I don't like that I don't have room to do my scrapbooking and quilting at the same time, and that I have to put all my supplies for one craft away in the basement if I want to work on the other. It's a lot of hauling stuff up and down stairs and piles of stuff in my basement storage room. Part of my basement is a finished family room, and the other part is what is in these pictures.

You can see my scrapbooking stuff in the second picture. Those white cubes are wooden and super heavy when filled with paper, and a real pain in the butt to carry up and down stairs. The third photo is where my new craft/sewing room is going to be. See all the boxes and bags? Fabric and batting. I'm putting up a new wall to separate the furnace and washer and dryer (and a smaller storage area, which you can see in the first photo) to create my new space.

I've had 6 quotes from contractors to do this work. I've chosen my guy and signed a contract; work will start the first or second week of January. I'm so excited I think I'm going to pee my pants. The finished space will be approx. 12' x 13'. In the third photo where you can see the black shelves, there will be a wall of closets on the left hand wall, and across the back - where the black shelves are now - will be a solid wall of upper and lower kitchen counters with laminate counter tops and under-cabinet lighting. There will be a space in between to fit a chair.

In the second picture showing the scrapbooking white storage, there will be a proper sewing table that I'm going to buy from the Sewing Machine Hospital, my local sewing machine shop and repair place. There will be a large cut-out in that wall to connect this new room with the family room on the other side of that wall. So I can see the tv when I'm sewing, and also so the light from the 8' windows at the top of the basement stairs will come into the new space.

The space is super-messy in these pictures because I realized that I would have to do a major purge in order to clean out my storage room, and I was right in the middle of it when I remembered to take the "before" pictures. Last weekend I packed up 18 moving boxes of stuff to dontate to Goodwill. The space is a lot more empty now.

I'll keep posting as the work progresses. Merry Christmas to me, Merry Christmas to me...:-)