Evolution of a Scrap Space, pt 2

(the second of what is looking like 3 posts about my various scrap spaces)

The New House
Basement Kitchen, 2007

When we were looking at houses, the huge, fully finished basement of ours was a selling point. There is a bar area (with a grill!) for Chris and friends, a massive play area for the kids and a whole kitchen for my scrapping. I loved the idea of standing up to work at the counter and a nearby sink for messy stuff. Then we moved in – Chris escapes to his friend’s house, Amelia doesn’t really play independently in the basement (yet), and the kitchen area failed on several counts as a scrap space:
1. lousy lighting.
2. isolated from family - no one was hanging out down there other than me.
3. no desk area for my computer.
4. standing hurt my feet and back and there was nowhere for my feet with a stool.
5. dust and dead flies kept ending up on the counter under the window, so I couldn’t leave projects out.
6. The view of the furnace, electric panel and phone/internet cabling wasn't very inspiring.

2008 Dining Room Dresser



Then I moved upstairs to the dining room. Since most of my stash was still downstairs, it became easy to see what I wasn’t really using. The dresser storage forced me to pare down to the necessities – tools and stash. I made paper kits from the stash still down in the basement kitchen. I bought a Cricut with SCAL and sold most of my die collection and lots of other stuff. And the table was a freebie in rough shape, so I didn’t feel bad about making a mess with the kitchen right there for cleanup. I finished a lot of pages and refined my Library of Memories system during 7-8 months.

++++

So what happened to (almost) perfection? In the late summer, we inherited a dining room set, which we need for hosting family during the holidays, but not great for my scrapping dresser, which had to move. And I got pregnant at the same time. So everything got dumped in the basement and I didn’t (paper) scrap. In my misery and stash chaos, I actually considered giving up paper scrapping altogether and spent the fall teaching myself about digital scrapping.

Then the 4 months of nausea and depression faded away, and I awoke in January with a major scrapping mood. I decided I really like digi for certain things, but I like paper for others.

I’ve been ad hoc scrapping in the dining room since, but I’m tired of going up and down stairs for supplies, and there is something scrap related in every room in the house. And I loathe having to do cleanup every day and major cleanup at least once a week, so I don’t, always.

Back to the drawing board on a scrap area again. And (for now) that space is still the dining room. I need to work through some organizational challenges in this area.

Evolution of a Scrap Space, pt 1

For what feels like the umpteenth time, I spent the weekend rethinking my scrap stuff organization. Not sure if it's late-pregnancy nesting, or frustration with the piles that keep building up in the dining room, bedroom, etc.

As part of that process, I was looking at where I've been, what I've done before, what worked, what didn't. So for my own edification, here is a pictorial history of my scrap spaces.

The Old Apartment(s)
Crop in Style Navigator, Jr and the Living Room Coffee Table, circa 2001

My tools lived in a computer desk drawer, my stash lived in a Crop In Style, Jr tote and I scrapped sitting on the floor at the coffee table, with some computer journaling at my nearby desk. Seriously, the *junior* tote held my stash. I carry a bigger bag to work every day. Would you believe I completed 3 gift albums, 1 travel album and about 10 chronological layouts in that first year of scrapping?

Tiny Room, circa 2002




The extra (6x9) bedroom in our new apartment. I spent a lot of time scrounging for furniture, organizing my growing supplies and surfing 2Peas, but not much time scrapping. The only lighting was a dinky 60w fixture on the opposite wall, no natural light, and I missed my honey. Also, the cabinets were way too deep and stuff got lost back there. Loved my $7 Amvets office desk (don’t ask Chris about it – it was a beast to get in and out of that room). I complained about the isolation and light, so Chris graciously traded offices and the tiny room became the Guitar Lair.

Enclosed Front Porch, 2005
(sorry, no pics)
For the room swap, we painted the walls and ceiling lighter colors, and Chris put up long shelves over the huge table a la Becky Higgins, since there was no wall space due to the 110” picture window and the French doors into the living room. I actually got a decent amount of scrapping done here on weekend mornings (great light), or dragged stuff over to the coffee table at night because this room was freezing cold for the majority of the year. But it was mostly gift albums and the mass reorganization of about 80 years of photos that I rescued from my parents damp basement.

Armoire in Living Room, 2006-07



The tiny bedroom was becoming the nursery, so Chris needed a new office space. I gave up the front porch, and decided to buy a computer armoire and use it for scrapping and computer, so we could lock up my unsafe stuff when the baby was bigger. I couldn’t find an armoire interior I liked, so we built our own over the course of about 4 months. Chris really put a lot of effort into this to satisfy his obsessive, pregnant wife. I’ll be honest - not much scrapping got done in 2006, just planning and organizing ad nauseum. Oh, and we took about 3,000 pictures of the new cutie when she arrived. For stash storage purposes, the armoire worked great – the big frustrations were that household paperwork accumulated because the file cabinet was in Chris’ office, and the scrap stash started to get too big for the armoire when I started buying all that cute Baby Girl stuff. And I found it frustrating to put the folding table away regularly when I was in the middle of my Library of Memories sorting.

But Amelia really liked the table while she was learning to stand :)


And this post has gotten long enough, so I'll save the new house for another one.

Almost finished :)

I took Stacy Julian's Library of Memories class in 2007, and I've audited the class every year as an alumni to get my system back in order. One of the things I never bothered to do was create the title pages, or spine titles for my albums. I figured it was more important to spend time on the pages, for now.

One of Amelia's favorite activities is to look at my albums. Just about every Saturday we cuddle on the couch and look at one or two albums. Which of course led to me being bothered that there were no spine labels, which led to me being annoyed there were no title pages. :P

No more! I sat down over the last few days and made the spines in Photoshope Elements using dingbats, and then the title pages, using my Cricut and Sure Cuts Alot to cut the alpha and shape. I'm very happy with how they turned out. Now I just need to make the ones for our Us albums and I can cross off another project on my "unfinished" list.

Title Pages:


Spine Labels:




Credits:
Fonts: Minion & Clarendon Serial Light MT
Dingbats: wwFreebie, Webdings2, Zapf Dingbats
Sure Cuts Alot with Cricut