A while back, I wrote an article about my horrible temporary workroom that I’d been in for three years. I’m about halfway done reonvating the new room, so I thought it was time to give an update on progress. Since I’ve also moved into one side of the room and started using it, I thought I’d share what I learned about the new space so far, and the changes I’m making in my original plans.

This is what my new workroom looked like when I started: bare floor, dirty walls, and a pile of supplies with which to work some magic. I had four general things to do to whip this room into shape:

1. Electrical work. The room now has a new, completely silent Hunter ceiling fan, controlled by a wall switch, so I can turn the lights on when I walk into the room instead of fumbling for the pull chain on the fan. I also swapped out nasty old outlets for nice new grounded ones. I considered moving the outlets up the wall, above the countertop, but opted to plug power strips in and anchor them where I needed them—my one concession to making the house resale friendly.

2. Paint. This room belonged to an eight year old before I bought the house, and it had little boy funk all over the walls—old poster tape residue, holes, dirt, and stuff I was too afraid to examine closely enough to identify. It was really nasty! This is a photo of the paint job halfway through, and you can see the difference between the old wall on the left, and the new paint job on the right. I painted walls and ceiling with two coats of Behr Ultra Pure White Interior Eggshell Enamel, which is the same white paint I’ve used elsewhere in the house. This paint is more of a cool white than a warm one, so it doesn’t yellow. It also increases the amount of light bouncing off the walls by quite a bit. I use eggshell to keep the glare down—I want light, not reflection. The room is now quite bright during the day without adding overhead light, which is a huge improvement over the light quality in my temporary quarters.

3. Flooring. I struggled with flooring choices for quite a while before opting for vinyl tile. I wanted something that was easy to clean and that would take a beating—but it also had to work well with my African slate tiles in the hallway, and the wood floors in the adjacent bedrooms. I found a vinyl tile that was an almost exact match for the slate in the hall—OK, the texture is printed on instead of dimensional, but the transition between the two isn’t too horrible. I also opted for brown vinyl baseboards in this room rather than the stained wood elsewhere in the house, simply for ease of cleaning. My one gripe so far is that the vinyl over concrete is much harder than the padded carpet on my old room, so I have to invest in some fatigue mats—I work standing up rather than sitting, and by the end of a long work day, my legs hurt from standing on the hard floor.

4. Cabinetry. This is a photo of the run of cabinets and countertop I’ve already installed. I purchased the black drawer unit at a local used office furniture store, and then built a base cabinet to hold all my little drawer units and support the countertop. I’m happy to say that the countertops were leftovers from my kitchen disaster, courtesy of Home Depot and Kraftmaid—they shipped an eight foot end panel four times before they finally got it right, and kept telling me to keep the wrong ones rather than ship them back. I’ve been storing these in the garage, knowing I could use them in my workroom.

The other side of the room isn’t finished yet, because I keep moving the furniture around. I decided to go ahead and move in the one side, and see if the space I’d designed was usable. The first day, I had pages in eight decos, two altered book layouts, a matchbox shrine, two vintage nude decos and an altered postcard on my list of things to do, which is an average work day for me. After walking back and forth between my new workroom and my computer in the next room about 100 times, I realized that putting the computer in its own room just isn’t going to work for me. My artwork has changed enough that it relies on having a computer handy, so I need all the toys in one room. Fortunately, I could move things around a little bit to make room for a computer desk, but it does mean that my sewing equipment will be banished to the second room. I think that’s a compromise I can live with.

So much for the things I don’t love so far—here are some improvements that are working really well for me:

I invested in a used two-drawer lateral file. I used to store all my smaller papers in a regular filing cabinet, so the stuff that was pushed into the back of each drawer got lost. Now, I can see everything! I’m still working on the perfect sorting system—right now, it’s by type of paper, but perhaps sorting by color might be better. Regardless, I can see what’s in each drawer, and grabbing the right paper went much faster.

In the yet-to-be-built run of cabinets is a set of shelves for my 12 x 12 papers. I never thought that my skill set would have to include building cabinetry, but to get exactly what I want, I’ll have to bite the bullet and pound some nails.

In my old room, I had a pile of rolled papers that kept falling over stuffed in a corner, and a bunch of handmade papers hanging in the closet. I would always forget about both, since they were away from the other papers, and also away from my work table. Now, I have rolls of paper right at the end of one run of cabinets. This is just a shoe cubby turned on its side, and so far, it’s working well. I’m a little worried about how much paint and embossing dust will end up on these papers, but I’ll deal with that issue later.

I really liked my ink storage system, but had outgrown the drawers in the old room. I found some nice tilt-front drawer units just like the ones in the cabinet I’d been using at Home Depot, and bought as many as I could fit on the wall. The tiny space between the drawers and my rubber stamp storage holds a row of embossing powders—now I can see all the pretty colors I have, instead of just staring at a sea of white lids in the top drawer.

I had ephemera all over the place—in drawers, in boxes in the hallway, on shelves in my bedroom. Now, I have a big cabinet with plastic storage bins. I invested in a labelling machine, so eventually, all these will have nice little labels telling me what’s in them.

I haven’t conquered the closet yet, but since the sewing machine is moving into the other room, I’m sending all the fabric there, too. That leaves the closet available for more ephemera storage! Be afraid…

That’s it so far. I’m hoping to finish up the other half of the room before the end of the summer.