A couple of weeks ago, my sister, The Gabbers, became an Actual Grown-Up Responsible Type Person(tm) and moved out of our parents' house with her guy. It was an interesting undertaking. A week before move in day, she and Her Guy swiped some furniture from Her Guy's dad's place that he was emptying out, but The Gabbers was apartment sitting at the time and he had his own apartment that he was moving out of. Naturally, there was some interesting live action Tetris with this furniture in our house for a week until the actual date when they could move in.
Actual move in day went about how we all expected. The Gabbers' friends with a truck, my dad with our aunt's truck, and Her Guy's friends with a truck were all at our house for furniture and the majority of The Gabbers' things before 10:00 am. By the time The Gabbers and Her Guy had woken up, packed up the last of their things, and wrangled his cat into the cat carrier, it was closer to noon and we nearly had everything in the trucks. By 12:30 pm, all vehicles were loaded and headed down to the new place.
This blog is not about the new place. This blog is about The Gabbers' old room.
You see, The Gabbers had moved into the master bedroom of our house after graduating from college. Pickleface (the youngest) was living up there because he was the youngest and there was a tradition of rooming the two smallest children in that room until they attempt to murder each other and move the oldest to somewhere else. Pickleface didn't actually need that much space and his computer is downstairs, so he switched to the old downstairs bedroom that Gabbers had.
(If you're wondering why my parents never claimed the master bedroom, it's a funny story. When we moved into this house 22 years ago, my parents bought a bed. They tried to put that bed into this room, but the room is shaped like a plus sign (+) with the bottom prong lopped off and there wasn't anywhere where the bed and two end tables fit. So they chose a smaller room where someone could actually walk around the bed.)
So, Gabbers moves out of this room. Not everything left with her. Some things were left there for me to go through -- she left me some guidelines for what should be kept and what should be donated or trashed because The Gabbers inherited a bit of our grandma's crazy pack rat genes and knows it. Some things were left because The Gabbers needed some place to keep them until she had proper storage (namely, artwork). And some things were piles of stuff that needed to be sorted out.
I didn't go with The Gabbers to the new place on move in day because I knew I'd never have this opportunity again once people returned to the house. I spent 5 hours turning this "empty room" --
-- into this empty room! With vacuumed carpet! I needed to empty that vacuum three times because of all the debris from the corgi who made a mess of anything paper and plastic up there.
That's not quite how it looks now, of course. Some of that stuff has gone to The Gabbers on other trips down and the instruments are all in the closet now until The Gabbers figures out when she wants them.
My mother and I have also decided that our yarn stashes will both eventually live in that room. Mom's got more plans for basic storage because there's a lot of stuff that's stacked neatly in corners in our house that don't currently have a proper spot, but until that's all figured out, it's a craft storage space.
Here's 1/3 of my mom's yarn. She needed to empty out one of three plastic storage bins for The Gabbers and chucked its contents into this dresser -
And here's my yarn stash, sewing stuff, and related bulky/inconvenient storage items -
This enabled me to reorganize my room some parts of my room so that it looks like this -
I know it doesn't really look that different, but it feels HUGE without the stack of cubes in front of the bookshelves, the stack of cubes next to that little folding table, and my packed up sewing machine sticking out so that I trip over it when I walk next to my bed. And having the phone booth DVD thing in the tiny corner really opens up that bookshelf that was behind it.
And it let me use this little space much better -
That's the space in the little end table that my printer sits on. It had those same two baskets, but one had my yarn winder and the other had my sock loom, spare things for my cricket loom, those toilet paper tubs, and whatever other yarn related things could fit.
The basket to the right is now my hand-spinning item dump. Those wooden pieces are for my adjustable niddy-noddy and those toilet paper rolls are to wind plied yarn onto until it's niddy-noddy time. My three spools will also go in there once I'm finished with my current roving. Nothing sticks out of it, so it's on top of a box of origami paper.
The basket on the left is full of paper craft stuff. Card making supplies, card stock, stickers, other flat paper related things... now easy to reach and all in one place! Huzzah!
Yeah. So that's a hell of a post. I'll have some Halloweeny things and knitting things to talk about sooooon.
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