Moving and organizing

Over the past week or so I've been making my new space in the workshop a little home away from home for me and Lachlan. At the rate things are going with my shops, I'll hopefully be spending a LOT of time out there, so I want it to be comfortable for Lachlan and set up in a way that I can get things done in the most efficient way possible. Because right now, my workflow is anything but efficient, especially when Lachlan is napping.

My mom got a kick out of seeing me in action as I tried to pack orders. If Lachlan is napping I have to walk to the opposite side of the house and into my closet to tape a box, because the sound of the packing tape on the tape dispenser is known to wake him from a nap. And my gosh, do I need every minute of his naps to get stuff done. Nobody and nothing messes with his nap time! Quite often I get all the way back to the closet and realize I forgot the tape (no lie), so I walk back out to the kitchen. I almost always get sidetracked with something, and 5 minutes later when I walk back into the closet with my tape, I realize that I left the box sitting on the kitchen counter... And I can't tell you how many hours a week I waste looking for the stickers or the labels or the cards or the ribbon or that ball of twine I KNOW I left on the bed under the pile of envelopes--the pile of blue envelopes, not the pile of green envelopes. Or maybe I put it on the shelf of my closet under the doilies. Or is it in the box with the wood tags? You get the idea.

But that is alllllll about to change. I'm about to have things at my fingertips. I'm about to have a place for everything, and everything in its place. I'm about to start rocking and rolling.

But first I have to finish moving into the new space. It's a slow and painful process, trying to figure out exactly how to set up the space in the best way to hold all my stuff, especially because I keep finding new stuff to add to my inventory almost daily. (Shhhh. Hear that? That's the husband with his hands over his ears, screaming like a mad man. He only thinks I'm joking when he hears me already talking about expanding my area in the workshop...)

So here is a tiny look into the new space at the moment. I am still trying to figure out where to put more shelves or cabinets or peg board or whatever to hold more amounts of my stuff. But for now, it's quite nice.



And YES, that is a couch (that folds down into a bed), a coffee table (that will have those sharp edges modified) and a RUG (ain't she pretty??). It's all  for Lachlan. Really. And yes I am on the lookout for a small dorm size fridge (yeah, baby!). And I already have the little DVD player and TV waiting in the wings for when I need an electronic babysitter. :)



The space is so awesome that I thought I'd better put up a sign to keep the riff-raff out!

Progress in the workshop

After several days of priming and painting walls and floors, my new space in the workshop is finally coming together. Tonight I started moving in some of the awesome things I found at Habitat for Humanity.

On the back wall of the space I have two desks, which are actually some really nice SOLID wood vanities. And when I say solid wood, I mean they weigh a bazillion pounds each. When they were removed from their last home, some of the trim pieces around the edges were removed, but I think with just a bit of stain they will look fabulous. When my wonderful loving husband returns home after spending 6 weeks in Australia (scuba diving, among other things) and asks what he can do to make it up to me, I'll ask him to make a countertop for these two desks. One will be for me, and one will be for Lachlan when he gets bigger. :)



(Sorry the pictures are sort of fuzzy; they were taken with my phone, which is covered in construction crud at the moment.)

On the side wall I put a huge metal locker that was practically brand new (!) and a set of open metal shelves. I still can't believe the deal I got on these at Habitat!!



And on the wall by the main door to the rest of the workshop, I put the awesome base cabinet I found at Habitat. I think it is made of Hickory and it is in near perfect condition and already has its own countertop.



If you're wondering why there is a water faucet in there (to the right of the base cabinet), this was the last space of the workshop left to one day be converted into a stall for a horse. I decided to give it up in order to have more space for all my shop items, but the husband thought we should leave the faucet since it's already there. And the floors are just sheets of plywood, so I guess if anyone ever wanted to convert it back to a space for a horse down the road, they could easily rip up the floors and that horse would have one awesome little home.

I still have several other pieces that I have to move in here, but I need to paint most of them first. Then I'll assess the situation and get whatever else I need. Once the husband gets home, I'll have him finish putting the trim around the top of the walls and the casing around the doors.

I'm just SO excited about this new space. I think my mom and I will start moving some of my stuff out there tomorrow. Weeee!

Workshop before and after

A few weeks ago I shared with you a few pictures of the sad state of our workshop...

It was a total disaster. While we remodeled our house, most of our belongings were packed up and stored some place in here. And then we just kept adding to the piles over the course of about three years.

That, in combination with a husband who likes to keep boxes that are only partially (or very minimally) full rather than consolidating items into a single box, resulted in complete and total chaos. It became one of those spaces that just makes you anxious and uneasy. Plus it was frustrating that we could never find anything, let alone actually work in there!

The husband had to go to Australia for a few weeks, so I took full advantage of that time to completely organize and clean the whole space. He wasn't supposed to be back until September 30, but he ended up coming home early about two weeks ago so I didn't get to finish everything I wanted to do. But I made three trips to Goodwill, filled up the large trash bin at least twice, and recycled a bazillion boxes. And all of the things we've been missing while they were packed have finally found new homes in the house.

The end result is a clean and organized space. I even mopped the floor!!!

I still have some things to get rid. In the photo above there is a rolling cart full of letterpress cases and type and stuff that I need to get rid of. But all of the boxes on the shelves above have been sorted and labeled so we can find what we're looking for. Like items are grouped together (garden stuff on one set of shelves, coolers on another, camping gear on another) and positioned according to how often they're used and who is most likely to use them (items I need regular access to are on lower shelves).

The area is still pretty crowded because the husband's old camaro is parked inside, but at least there are plenty of clean work surfaces, and all of the husband's tools are on rolling carts that can be easily moved around the shop.

Yay for organization!

I'll be signing off from here for a few days. My computer is finally (FINALLY!) back from being fixed. It had to go back to HP where they decided it was a hard drive problem. So now I have a new hard drive with nothing on it (thank goodness I backed it up!), so I'll be spending the next week or so hunting down all my software to reinstall and then rebuilding all of my files. And I think I'll take this opportunity to do some large-scale cleaning and organizing of my files, too! Hope you all have a happy weekend, and hopefully I'll be back to blogging on my main computer soon!

Labor day

I hope you all are having a good Labor day. Mine has been pretty productive so far.

I took a car load of cardboard boxes to be recycled. And I do mean a car load. The back of my vehicle was completely full, as was the front seat and the part of the back seat not occupied by Lachlan.



It's great to be rid of all those boxes, but it's super fantastic to be rid of all the STUFF that used to be in those boxes out in the workshop. Yes, sir. Progress in that department has been good. (Thanks to my awesome baby sitter!)

Then my little helper and I headed out into the garden to survey the situation. Lachlan wondered when we are going to make more tomato sauce. He sure liked them 'maters the other day!



While he was entertaining himself with dirt and leaves, I was stuffing my face with raspberries. Mmmm, raspberries.



Now I'm headed back out to the workshop for the next round of organization. I've gotten rid of a lot of stuff and now I am entering the important phase of organizing what's left!

Pack rats

I've really enjoyed hearing from some of you about your own problems with a pack rat spouse hanging on to old textbooks. It's so comforting to know that I'm not alone!

Several of you have asked how I got the husband to agree to get rid of his old textbooks. Although it may vary from husband to husband, here's the process that worked for me. First, determine how long you can stand to look at the books, and then start at least a year before then. You have to wear them down and break their spirit, and that takes some time.

Second (this is the most important step), you need to overwhelm them with stuff. If there is so much stuff and chaos in their life, and they're forced to work in that environment on a daily basis, they'll soon realize that they need to give up or they will go insane. How you go about overwhelming them will be up to you, but I found that saying "YES!" every time someone calls to ask if you want more letterpress stuff is an excellent way to create a chaotic and claustrophobic environment in the shortest amount of time. See what I mean?





Last, but certainly not least, wait until the husband has to go out of town. Then arrange to do video skype, and during your conversation surprise him by presenting each book one at a time and giving him the option to use one of three "saves" to keep it. It helps if the video quality is poor and the books are very dusty. It's a lot easier for them to say no when they're not in the same room as the books. Of course, the downside to this is that they may use their "save" for some other items on the chopping block...

Elementary differential equations

I'm doing a little late summer cleaning and organizing around here, and last night I had a pretty major breakthrough. I was finally able to pry the husband's fingers off his old school books! I'm not sure why he felt the need to keep them all these years, although I guess that a book on Elementary Differential Equations could come in handy when you find yourself having trouble sleeping.



It took a tiny bit of convincing, but he finally agreed that we really don't need to keep these for Lachlan (!). Our life is now about 25 pounds lighter.



(Yes, that's right. He had two copies of the same calculus book...)

It pays to clean

I'm still working on my massive cleaning/organizing project that I started in our back bedroom. It began on Monday morning when I took everything out of the bedroom (except the furniture) and placed it all over the rest of the house. Talk about uncontrolled chaos.

And when I say that I'm "cleaning," I don't mean sweeping, pulling down the cobwebs, and dusting the shelves. I mean that I'm going through every box, every drawer, every shelf, and every file folder, and organizing, sorting, downsizing, AND cleaning. No wonder I am now on my third day of this project.

I have finally started putting stuff back into the room, which has conveniently freed up space on the carpet in the living room so Sadie can stretch out.



Although exhausting, cleaning in this way certainly has its perks. Yesterday afternoon I attacked the two drawers in the hutch on my desk.



I found all sorts of fabulous stuff I had forgotten about, like my pile of foreign money from work trips to Thailand, Ethiopia and Afghanistan.



And I found my long lost collection of Afghan business cards, including the carpet shops that I visited on a regular basis. Rauf and Rahim at Nomad were two of my go-to guys for carpets. I crack up every time I look at these cards and their creative spelling of common English words.



Cleaning like this is great. It's fun to walk down memory lane when you discover old things, and it's such a refreshing feeling to have everything so clean and organized. But there are other benefits, too. Like finding these two bad boys tucked up against the front of one of the drawers!



I remember putting them there about three years ago. I knew that I'd forget about them and that one day I'd discover them and it would be an awesome day. Looks like Goober and I get to go shopping. Weeeeeee! 

Perfect storm

Have you ever heard of a perfect storm? The term is used to describe an event where a rare combination of circumstances will aggravate a situation drastically.

I think I am in the middle of a perfect storm. My circumstances: 1) I'm printing like a crazy lady right now, trying to beat the clock and get a bunch of stuff done for Christmas before my belly gets any bigger. This means that I have sheets of paper, cut blank paper, printed paper, envelopes, and letterpress plates on every available surface in the house right now. 2) Since finishing our remodel earlier this summer, I have been meaning to tear the house apart to clean it--you just can't believe how much grout dust gets into the back corners of every kitchen cabinet. 3) Because we were still working on the house this spring, my Spring Cleaning urges were ignored and have built up. 4) I'm nesting; you know, that fun instinct pregnant ladies get when a baby is on the way. It makes even normally sane people go beserk cleaning.

I said all that as my excuse for why my house looks like it does right now. It ain't pretty, folks.













I am starting this process in the closet of the guest room at the back of the house, and I can't tell you how awesome it is to already have about 6 square feet of the cleanest, most organized closet on the planet. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to the nest.

Moving in

I'll be spending the better part of today out in my new studio. I have to print a few things today, but first I wanted to show you how the new space is coming along. Progress is slow but steady!

The husband finished all the electrical work and installed my two 8' fluorescent lamps with awesome bulbs. They have a color temperature of 5000k and a color rendering index of 92, which basically means they are great for printing because the colors of the ink appear closest to what they would look like in natural daylight. It's so bright in this space that you almost have to wear sunglasses. I love it! The husband also installed a ceiling fan for me, which makes me feel particularly spoiled. :)



We kept a few of the cabinets from our old kitchen, and the husband installed those and made a nice countertop and "backsplash" for me out of plywood. He even put a nice finish on it. And I had mentioned to him that I wanted to hang the pegboard above the cabinets, so he surprised me by doing that, too. It isn't exactly how I envisioned it, but it will work for now. I may have to make some slight adjustments to it down the road. It is a little high for me (I'm sort of a short munchkin) and I had planned to install open shelves above it to hold bulky stuff (packing peanuts and whatnot) that I don't have to access all too often.

I bought a small paint pod from my local Ace store in the color "Misty Morn" and painted the pegboard to get a bit of color in the room. Now I just need to get all my pegboard accessories so I can hang stuff on it and get really organized!



I also moved my three cheap-o Walmart bookcases and plywood top into this space, and they're currently holding all of my paper and envelopes. I also stole some of the husband's plastic shelves to use for bulky items. I'll probably reorganize things a million times before I find what works best for me, but this does the trick for now.



We positioned my type cabinets on the far wall, and in the coming weeks I need to finish sorting all of my type (currently stacked on rolling shelves seen at the front of the picture) and get it put away in the cabinets.



This weekend I'm hoping to move my smaller press and my two antique paper cutters onto the long wall with windows to keep the big press company.

And somewhere along the way I plan to add a small sitting area and a "Sadie Bug nap spot," but that's pretty low on the list at the moment. (Don't tell Sadie.)

Have a great weekend. I'll be back on Monday with the winner of the letterpress note cards!

Pegboard

Back when the girls were small, they lived in a cardboard box in our bathroom. They quickly outgrew that, but their chicken house wasn't ready, so the husband bought a 4x8 piece of pegboard from Home Depot for about $6, cut it into four pieces, and wired the ends together to form a temporary chicken coop in our workshop.

Now that the girls have moved into their luxurious accomodations, I have four pieces of pegboard that need a new home. I'm thinking of sprucing them up with some paint and hanging them on this long wall in the studio, between the top of the base cabinets and some upper shelves I plan to install.



I've been searching through Google images looking for ideas and inspiration, and here are a few of my favorites (shame on me for not saving their original link!). Have any of you used pegboard to organize your stuff? I'd love to see what others have done!









And in the world of freaky coincidences, I see that someone else has this same idea today! I guess printers' minds think alike. :)

Belgian oak sideboard

About two weeks ago, I told you I recently acquired two awesome pieces of furniture from an antique store outside of Denver. The first was this old cart that was used in a Thomasville furniture factory to move pieces of furniture from one spot to the next in the assembly line.

This is the other piece. It's a 1920ish oak sideboard from Belgium, and I am thrilled to pieces to have it in my life. After we remodeled our house, I had this long wall right near the front door. I've looked for more than a year for an antique something of the right size to put on this wall. I had finally given up when I came across this awesome find.



It is about 4 feet high and 8 feet long and is the perfect combination of storage space for kitchen items I don't use very much, and also for many of the cast iron pots I have that are weighing heavily on the rolling shelves in my regular kitchen cabinets. The top of it provides the perfect surface for displaying our many "things" and also a nice landing spot for mail, keys, and cell phones. 



I love that it's so simple, with just a bit of detail on the arch of the doors. I particularly love the key to the cabinets! And I am still giddy over the amazingly good deal I got on it. It turns out that they have a new shipment of goodies coming in next month and they were having a huge sale to clear out their existing inventory. I got this for basically the guy's cost to buy it and ship it here. I couldn't buy half of the wood to build this for the price I paid. Man, I love a good deal!!



The wood is very dry, so I'm spending a lot of time oiling it before I break out all my knick knacks for the top. And now I'm plotting what to do for the space on the wall above it. I have a ton of paintings and other notable items I've collected from my travels, and the other day I got the perfect idea of what to do to display them. The brilliant Linda over at Lime in the Coconut installed gallery shelves in her house to display all her goodies, and I'm thinking I might just steal that idea! I'm hoping to talk the husband into building some shelves out of the antique oak boards we have left over from our project on the front porch.

Studio update

My little studio space continues to waffle between chaos and order, but the other day we took one more orderly step forward.

A while back I bought three super cheap ($20 each) black bookcases from Wal-Mart and arranged them in a U-shape against the wall. It most certainly is not my ideal storage solution, but that gorgeous antique wood flat file or bookcase continues to elude me.

The husband took a scrap piece of plywood and cut it to my specifications, and I stained it, gave it a quick coat of polyurethane, and plopped it on top of the bookcases to create a workspace.



I finally found my old sugar mould that I bought years ago in Frederick, Maryland, and I filled it with all my colored markers, rulers, scissors, etc. It makes me happy (SO happy!) to have them so organized.



I also finally organized the area under my small paper cutter, arranging the pantone inks by color so I can find the darn things, and placing labels on the small cans of ink that I mixed by hand.



Let's hear three cheers for being more organized!!

Factory 20

I almost fell off my chair this morning when I discovered Factory 20 via a post at Hello!Lucky.

Here is just a very small sampling of the items I am obsessed with. (Can you tell I love items for storage??)















I think that library two-sided bookcase table above is my favorite! So simple, but so functional.

Also, I had a request for directions on how to make the seed pots I posted yesterday, so I'll be posting a tutorial tomorrow. I had planned to do it today but I need to take a few more pictures in the good light this afternoon.