Our Room

I”ve been busy. My hubby agreed to move his “office” into the little area next to the “family room” and let me have the room his “office” was in. This is a big deal, a really big deal.

His desk is long and obnoxious to a degree, but it “just fits” putting it in that one position. Phew! I am glad of that.

The office room is/was full of stuff and a mess, mess, mess the messiest mess of messiness here. I’ve wanted to do something with this room for a long time and now have my chance to clean it out and set it up for crafty usage. 🙂 The computer desk, desktop computer, is in there now, here actually, where I am typing currently.

I’ll set up the “daybed” again, it’s been dismantled propped up on the wall in here for months now. It was my last baby’s crib, it’s a convertible thing and the mattress is a good cotton/wool mattress, so I like using it as a light sitting device. I want to reinforce it and put a board under the mattress, then it will be more solid, for a bit heavier use, but never, never, never for grown man usage. I am small and children are OK to sit on it, and I’m just a big kid, in that way. It looks charming though and will look fine with a nice cover and throw pillows, maybe a foam sort of daybed shaped cushion to make it more “couch” like.

The sewing machine will come in here too, and I’ll try to activate it again. It still works, but “how well will it work” is the question. It’s an older machine, built in the 1960’s. I got it in the 1980’s from someone my mother cleaned for. It needed a tune up then, and worked flawlessly afterwards. It’s sat around for a long time now, and has been moved to three different addresses since getting it fixed up back then. It’s a Singer, and looks just about what the picture in our old encyclopedias, that were printed in the very early 1970’s –that I grew up with, of “sewing machine” was. I don’t have those books, but then I could compare it since it was in the 1980’s and we had the set still. My machine looks older, but very similar. A real retro vintage look for sewing.

I’ve always liked it. It’s fancy, electric, but very manual as well. Lot’s of gadgets that are fairly complicated, depending on what the task is you wish to complete. I just like to use it to do simple sewing, constructing garments simple-like. FWIW. The last thing I made was a dress and pinafor for my daughter when she was One year old. I miss sewing, and really want to get back into it for making skirts, instead of buying most of them for me and my daughter. I have never made pants, and don’t think I will. Not for me, I don’t wear them, neither does my daughter. I won’t make them for the boys though, too fussy for me.

Dresses, skirts, and blouses and shirts I can do.

My crafty other things will come into this room too, and also the “home school” stuff will be in here. I still have work to do, get a few more things out of here and then get it set up better. There are three bookcases in here already, one for my stuff which is already on the shelves all along, and the other for DH’s work stuff. I’ve moved them around a bit, and am not sure if I’ll move them anymore. Someone pro-sprayed the walls in here this year, just with a horrible flat paint, and the concrete floor has that paint stuck on it for at least a foot and a half out from the wall, which makes moving furniture nearly impossible, it’s like having sandpaper on the floor. Urg! (This room is on a concrete slab, “the basement” walkout level.)

Hopefully this will aide me in my scrapbooking and rubber stamping and other endeavors, and I hope to get some of my photographs enlarged and framed to go onto the walls in here and around the house. I’ve “always” wanted to do that, and never have. (framing is what stops me, it’s so expensive!)

I’ll try and come up with a innovative way to deal with enlarged photos. Not the “frameless” plastic “frames though, well, maybe some of them could be that, I’m not sure now. I mean, I am open to anything else mostly. 🙂

In this whole affair is my husband’s office, and he’ll be in the “family room” now, so it’s still a dicey affair with three children in the house and hubby on the phone a lot for work. It’s something that we have to work out though, he needs space, but so do I, so do we, as a family, and me and the children as “living here all the timers” since we homeschool. We used to talk about sharing the room that is ‘mine’ now, but I couldn’t see that working and said so, my stuff being family oriented (very little ‘selfishness’ involved in my crafty things) I need to spead out and build up and have work stations. DH’s space took up a large portion of this room, and now that the desk is out of here the room feels bigger. The small space his desk is in now works since it’s just big enough, a cushy corner of room next to the bigger square-ish family space, so he’s next to open, and has plenty of room to move around out of the way, and has a little view through the bathroom right in front of his desk (a bathroom we still need to finish!) We’d like to find a nice headset for him to use with his phones in the house too, noise canceling mic and headphones, if possible.

The family room will needs to be “finished off” –we don’t really spend much time there still. Most of the drywall is up, just a little left to go around the outside edge of the ceiling, and the paneling isn’t up yet. We have things to do alright, and it just takes a bit of time, and a lot of brawn.

I actually did some brawny work on the ceiling in the ‘office’ yesterday and the day before. There was a big hole that was made to pull some wires, and never was repaired. For many reasons we need to rip out the ceiling and put in a new one someday, so for now I just put in a temporary patch, not “temporary” but a sloppy patch is better than a big hole over your head. It was hard enough to do this myself. It’s done though, which is a big relief. One day I’ll empty the room and we’ll rip the ceiling out. That will be a great day, but until then I’m making this a great room, and when the day comes, it’ll be easy enough to move my well organized room out to do the work on the ceiling. 🙂