On Wednesday I said I was going to start tidying my workroom. And I did! When I do these things, I like to do them properly, so after I’d cleared the floor, I started washing the walls down.
When I went to bed on Wednesday (well, Thursday) the room looked like this:
By the time I was half-way around the office/sewing area I had the realisation that you always need to wash the walls with sugar soap before you start painting, and seeing as I was in the middle of doing that anyway…
So Thursday became the day that it happened. I decided not to go all out and fill in all the holes (there are a few, previous owners must have had all sorts of things screwed/nailed/cellotaped/stuck on with packing tape to these walls), but rather, given that the place will need to be relined eventually, at this point I’d just get it looking fresher with a coat of new paint. Off I tootled to Mitre10 to pick up a pail of white paint, a roller and brushes. I was intending to go for a very crisp white, but once I’d looked at the prices for 4L I decided that the off white pail of Dulux sitting on the mistints table for $75 represented better value than a pail of untinted housebrand at $83 (not the cheapest one, I never go for that because you will not get even coverage from 2 coats. I had high gloss white and matte blue on the walls, so I needed good coverage, and my time is worth more than the savings from buying cheap paint).
Once I got home I shifted all that furniture you can see above – the garage was crammed! By the afternoon the room was looking like this:
And by bedtime…
Friday and Saturday I had work, so not so much progress was made, but this afternoon we shifted in the main pieces of furniture, including my new desk.
I’m not sure if this will be the final layout – I still have to work out whether the power cables will reach for the sewing machine and overlocker yet, and I also need to decide how to keep all the bits and pieces that I need as I’m sewing on hand, which probably means fitting in an extra piece of furniture. But right now, it looks SO much better than it did on Tuesday, when I first tweeted about needing to tidy.
So that’s the office and sewing area nicely on its way to sorted. My workroom is much larger than this though, so the project is not over yet. Next up is sorting through all my fabrics, getting them into suitable containers that will easily fit into the built in shelving under the long workbench. Once I’ve got that done it will be safe for me to start on painting that side of the workroom. But I’ve made sure that I’ve built in motivation to keep going.
See that blue doorframe. Yes. It’s still blue. And that will drive me crazy. Thereby ensuring that I do actually get on to stage two in a timely manner! I’m working every day this week, so it won’t happen quite so quickly, but tomorrow on the way home from work I’ll be popping in to Mitre10 again to get angle brackets to fix my desk and paint chips so I can choose the perfect shade for my accent colour.
