I’m Back!! … and with a new studio (soon!)

Hello,

It’s so good to be back on the blog.  It’s been a while.  Decided to take a break as I had too many things on the go and had to prioritize:  full time job, teaching classes, travelling to teach, new samples, new work, new ideas and last but not least, a new wonderful relationship.  But, it’s time to get back to my blog and to keeping in touch with you.  I have been posting on Instagram in the meantime, so I hope you were following along.

If you have been following along, you will know that I have been doing renos in the house for the past few months, mainly on the main floor; one of the main ones was repainting the house in a different colour.  I went with an almost white colour with a touch of gray and gray trim around windows and doors with lighter gray new doors.  Mike and I painted the main entrance before Christmas and it looks amazing.  Moved some furniture around, hung one of my pieces on the front hallway … Love it, love it, love it!!!

And we also finished the main floor bathroom, including new doors, new vessel (it’s green!) set on an antique small table, new mirror and yellow paint on the walls; well, everything is new as there’s a new toilet and new light fixture.

And 2018 arrived, and with it a plan to get the rest of the house painted … this time I hired someone as I did not want to spend every single free minute painting for the next six months. In a couple of weeks, a professional team will set foot in my house and take about 7-10 days to paint the main floor, the studio, hallway and master bedroom.  I can’t wait!

The downside is that I have to empty the rooms so they can spray the trim :-(.  Lots of work but it gave me the much needed excuse to redo my studio and get rid of things I haven’t touched in ages, and reorganize so when I do get to go back to sewing and creating, everything will be in order and in its place (I wonder how long it’ll last?).

Below are a few photos of the process so far.  I’m glad Mike took a photo of the studio before we took it all apart.  It looks chaotic, doesn’t it?  It was not THAT bad.  I just piled a whole bunch on stuff on the tables as I needed to move some furniture into the other rooms.  But … here it is, chaos in all it’s glory~

I look as if I’m in a daze … which I was – thinking about where I was going to put all the stuff I have around.  Thankfully, we decided to jump ahead and paint the main wall ourselves so we could install the Ikea PAX systems before the painters come so I can put everything back in place and it won’t take me that long later.

The satisfying part was getting to rip all that dirty carpet from years of putting my feet on the same spot!  Yuck!!!  And yes, I do vacuum … :-)

And … the new floors are in!  Isn’t this exciting.  I’d love to take credit for this, but Mike did all of it, although I did bring the boxes of planks upstairs and opened them up and laid them out by sets.  It looks great, doesn’t it?  I love it; it’ll be so easy to clean … it goes all the way into the hallway and the master bedroom.

Part of my Valentine’s Day present was to get the PAX installed … here’s the start of it.  Doesn’t it look great?  It’s nice to see where all the money I spent is going … a whole wall of storage!

Voila!!!  Mostly done – new floors, new drawers, shelves, baskets, pull out trays …

The exciting part is to put everything back in its place – and to move things back and forth between baskets and drawers until it all makes sense.  I wonder how many times I’ll switch things around until I’m happy?  :-)

Thanks to Sabri who came on Sunday to help me open boxes and place things where they needed to go.  Found some things that I did not remember I owned!  And of course … decided I needed more drawers so off we went to Ikea to get some more.

Stay tuned to more exciting news about the studio reno.  And for quicker updates, follow me on Instagram and Tweeter.

Thanks for reading.  Hope you keep creating …

Ana