New Studio!
Cheryl Sleboda of muppin.com hosts a Spring Clean Your Studio blog hop every year. I've participated in it in the past to try to get my mess more organized. This year is a bit different for me because we started building a house in August!
My old sewing studio was in a bedroom, I had an office and business items stored in a bedroom in the basement, and I had lots of sewing stuff stored in the closet and under the bed of the guest bedroom. Having things split up in three rooms and on two different floors was pretty difficult, and not at all efficient. So I was pretty excited that I was going to get a nice big studio in the new house.
My new studio is in the basement, but we have an exposed basement, so the house is one story in the front, and two in the back. Because of this, I get to have some nice bigs windows in there. Here is the construction crew putting up the first full wall of the house last fall, which just happened to be my studio! The two windows on the right are in my studio, and the third window is in the guest bedroom.
After the ceiling was up, and before the floor was poured, my husband did a walkthrough of the studio. We decided to go with 9 foot ceilings int he basement, so the room will be nice and spacious.
I couldn't decide on a color. There are SO MANY CHOICES to be made when building a house. And I was just paralyzed on which color I should paint the studio. So I told them to just go with all white on the trim and ceiling and walls. Then I could live with it for a while until it tells me what color it needs to be, and paint it myself later. And then the builder gave me a swatch book with like 500 whites and asked me which white I wanted. OMG. I have never in my 25 years of homeownership painted a room white. But, I kind of really like it. It's nice and bright and doesn't compete with any fabric or quilts. So I think I might actually like the white, and may live with it longer than I originally thought.
Once the room was complete, I promptly filled it with my mess and made it a disaster!
But I quickly got it cleaned up and started moving furniture into the right places. The flooring is vinyl plank that is glued directly to the cement slab. I wanted a hard floor instead of carpet so it's easier to clean up dropped pins and all of that fabric lint. We put radiant heat inside the poured slab, so the floor is nice and toasty, and it won't feel like we're walking on a freezing concrete slab in the midwest winter.
This L shaped space off in the corner is just jammed with all of my boxes and stuff at the moment, but it will eventually be the Gammil room. We built a granny flat at our house, which is located just above my studio. So, my mom will be moving in! I get free business help from her, and I'll be able to keep an eye on her as she ages without having to drive 2 1/2 hours to her house. If you've ever seen me at a qhult show or Quilt Market, chances are you've met mom. She's usually there helping to staff the booth. She'll be helping me sew, helping me pack up orders, and we have all other sorts of ideas for the business! She owns a Gammil longarm machine, and has quilted some of my quilts in the past. So the Gammil will be moving here, and I'll be using it a lot more frequently.
The shelves on the left are where I store my pattern inventory. There is a door on the left that goes up to the garage. That serves a couple purposes. If I ever get back to vending at quilt shows, it will be nice to be able to carry inventory and supplies from my studio directly up to the garage and put in a car. This is also how mom gets into the studio. She can go from her apartment into our shared garage and go down into the studio without going through our house.
This room is about 600 square feet. It looks huge right now, and it is admittedly much more space than I had in the old house. But we will be using every inch of it. It's not going to just be a huge sewing room for me. It also needs to be a sewing room for my mom, a place to store all of our fabric, projects, and craft supplies. And I need a space for an office, and space to store business inventory and a space to get orders assembled and ready for shipping.
Mom and I worked on a floorplan last fall. We broke the room into several zones. We put the sewing tables by the windows, and my office in the corner. We have a lot of plastic garage-type shelving that we'll put in a big U shape where we'll store all of our fabric and other supplies. My inventory shelves will also be in that area, and we'll have a table in the middle for shipping.
We're going to put 8 foot tall design walls made out of the pink foam insluation covered with flannel in front of the plastic shelves. That will help hide the shelves and all of their contents from the sewing area, and it will also help make that area seem more like its own little room.
When we did the electrical planning with the electrician, we made three different lighting zones in the room. The sewing area is one zone, the office and shipping area is another zone, and the Gammil room is the third zone. So we have plenty of recessed LED lights in here, and they all have a Kelvin temperature of 4,000. Typical soft white lightbulbs are about 2,700 Kelvin (kinda yellow), and daylight bulbs are 5,000 Kelvin (more blue). We wanted something closer to daylight bulbs, but not so blue.
We've already made some changes to the floorplan since our planning. There is a sewer stack that brings the plubimg down from the granny flat bathroom that we didn't anticipate. It's about a 15 inch square bump-out in the space that is right in the middle of where the inventory shelves were supposed to go. So we reconfigured that area a little. We've also moved the sewing areas around a tad. But we're pleased with the progress so far, and we're excited about having the proper space to get organized.
We still have a way to go, so I'll share more photos of our progess in the future! In the mean time, be sure to go visit the other quilters participating in the Spring Clean Your Studio Blog Hop!
March 29 - Raylee Bielenberg - http://sunflowerstitcheries.com
March 30 - Jen Frost - https://faithandfabricdesign.com
March 31 - Tara Gebhardt - https://quiltspluslove.com/quilt-stories
April 1 - Becca Fenstermaker - http://prettypiney.com/blog
April 2 - Leanne Parsons - http://www.devotedquilter.com
April 3 - Rebecca Lidstrom - http://Www.studiorquilts.com/blog
April 4 - Amy Bradley - http://purplepineapplestudio.com
April 5 - Sue Griffiths - https://www.duckcreekmountainquilting.com
April 6 - Kate Starcher - http://katiemaequilts.com/blog
April 7 - Tammy Silvers - https://tamarinis.typepad.com/
April 8 - Jessica Caldwell - http://Www.desertbloomquilting.com
April 9 - Monika Fritschi Henry - https://www.pennyspoolquilts.com/blogs/news
April 10 - Sara D Flynn - https://www.offbeatquilts.com/blog
April 11 - Bobbie Gentili - http://geekybobbin.com
April 12 - Cheryl Sleboda - http://blog.Muppin.com
