I lived in a cape cod type home with 2 bedrooms upstairs with pitched ceilings. Yes i had the dresser in the knee walls but i had a problem with frost. Cloths inside the drawers would get damp due to the change of tempature. I had to get inside the crawl space to add more insulation to prevent this. One of the bedrroms i turned into my sewing loft at that time and spent many hours there. It was a very narrow room. I didnt have any shelving space as it only had 3 walls. The 4th wall we knocked out and put in a railing to make it look like a loft. We took pine boards and nailed them up on the walls to make it look rustic. I used leftover pine boards and bricks and set it up as a shelving unit type wall like a partition in the room. l-l Half of the room was for sewing and cutting table. the other half was for storing larger items such as totes bolts of fabrics etc. on teh shelves, i stored my fabrics, patterns, batting, magazines, sewing notions etc.. At that time i worked for a woman who had a small cottage industry and so i need a place for this. It worked for a long time and it was cozy. I even had a rocker, small stereo system and end table to relax when i needed too. I love the big designer sewing rooms but for me its not practical. Keep it simple, recycle, reuse is my motto. Only expense i had then was for the pine boards. If u dont have wall space, then make wall using shelves to store ur items. Use bins from wally to store fabrics inside. Hope this helps.