My new favorite place

It's been about 6 months in the making, but my craft room is finally (pretty much) done! So, I'll start from the beginning. I unfortunately didn't take any before photos, but I'll paint you a picture of the guest room: white walls, ugly black dresser, futon, small bookshelf in one corner, ugly closet doors. Slowly but surely, we've made progress. We took the closet doors off when our ex-roommate moved into our other guest bedroom in October. We needed to be able to put some pretty big things in the now-craft room closet, and it just wouldn't work with doors. So, away they went. Then, on New Year's Day, I painted the ugly black dresser purple. Then I painted the walls. And this past 8 days has been dedicated to building the desk.

Ah, my desk. I love it so much. I had found this tutorial and showed it to Dan. So we decided to figure out how to make it work for us. The cubicles the tutorial used were too big, so rather than using 2 9-cube units and 1 6-cube unit, we used 3 6-cube units to make it narrower. Last weekend, Dan used the same basic set up to bolt them together, and they sat that way for this past week. Yesterday, we went back to Lowe's and had them cut large sheets of MDF to make the desktop surface. Then Dan sanded and I primed and painted the desk and voila! Craft/work desk.

So without further ado, here is my craft room as it is today.

This will be the "work" side of the desk. I will hopefully have an opportunity to work partially from home soon, and it will also be nice to have a place to do stuff for lia sophia, to search for projects or play around on Pinterest. Right over my workspace is the print a wonderful fellow-IF friend sent me. It says "In the midst of winter, I found within me an invincible summer," and I love it. I have plans in the works for some more art to go alongside that print somehow - something that will be a nod to the original, pre-infertility plans for this room.

This is the "craft" side, I suppose. I mean, the whole thing can be used for either, but when I think in terms of where I'm going to organize things in the cubes, my mind puts the work stuff on the left, and the craft stuff on the right. I also have this idea for ribbon organizing that Dan is going to help me with soon, and they'll go to the right of the bulletin board (which I intend will hold project ideas and not just wedding photos).

Here's the entire space. Pretty sweet, huh? I've got plenty of room on either side, and I can still add units underneath - I want to add a file cabinet or something with a door somewhere at some point.

One thing that didn't change is the futon. That's not going anywhere, since it gives space for other guests in case we ever have more than just one room filled, like we did when both my parents and my sister and brother-in-law visited. I used to have an Ikea print over it, but I decided to switch things up. I'd put the photography monogram together quite a while ago for the master bathroom. Though it doesn't look like it from this picture, the mats are dark purple so I figured they'd make a perfect statement in the craft room. Don't worry - that D is a little skewed in this photo, but I fixed it. They also don't all look as dinky in person. Oh, and Paisley loves that I have a spot for her and Clo to nap while I work :)

Swoon, my purple dresser! It's a thing of beauty :) The whole room color scheme is purple and green. I used it for our wedding and have loved it ever since. I actually had curtains in that same color in the apartment - I had two sets. Stupid me, when we had a yard sale, I sold a set since this room only has the one window. So then I had to go shopping for curtains that would work in this room, and lo and behold, these panels - which I got at Ross - are the exact same color and fabric. These are just a bit more contemporary with the grommet rather than a more traditional hanging system. And I've got my easel set up - I hope it will inspire me to paint.

So, there it is. My beautiful new room. It's very nice to just sit in there and relax, but I hope to be whipping up Pinterest projects in no time. Projects still pending are ribbon organization, general supply organization, shelves, more decorating, and making some fun pillows from the seemingly dozens of pins on my DIY board. For now, though, I'm calling this baby DONE and crossing it off my 101 in 1001.