works for me wednesday: shopping at home

If you're anything like me, you'll go along fine in your home until you suddenly decide that you need a certain piece of furniture or home decor item and you need it NOW. You'll almost immediately head out in search of said item, finding and purchasing numerous other items along the way, yet return home without that item in tow. And then, the next day, you'll head out again because really, you cannot survive another day without that item despite the fact that you were perfectly fine before it crossed your mind.

Or maybe I'm the only one.

My sewing room has pretty much been a mess since I bought my house and moved in three years ago. It is a main floor bedrom that became the spot to ditch all the miscellaneous boxes of stuff that I shouldn't have moved with me in the first place, stuff I didn't really need and therefore had no motivation to unpack. The room has never really recovered from that though it has been alternately a disaster and not too bad. I've recently started tackling it again, however it once again stalled a week or so ago when I decided that a small, low bookshelf would be perfect to put under the window to store the books that had nowhere else to go. A valid idea, to be sure, but it became more of an "I must have a bookshelf to put these books on before I can do anything else in the room" situation.

And so I hunted. I knew what I wanted. Something like the bookshelves that our ancient encyclopedias had sat on when I was growing up. A simple two-shelf bookshelf. Finding one around town - used since I wasn't going to pay for a new one - was another story. Two weeks of looking everywhere and then looking again at the same places produced nothing.

Today as I was working in the sewing room it occurred to me that I had a perfectly usable bookshelf (or what would work as a bookshelf) in my rec room. It was not what I had been envisioning and it was black as opposed to the white of the other shelves in the room, but a) it was free, b) it was sturdy, and c) it was the perfect size. Sold! I moved it up and it fits all the books that needed to go on it, a stack of oversized patterns, as well as two round boxes which hold my polyresin snaps (from my diaper-sewing days) and my zipper stash.

I have another small black bookshelf in a different style that I'm going to put beside it.

Pardon the mess. It acutally looks phenomenally uncluttered compared to how it has been in the past. To the right of the black shelf are the "legs" that hold up my two sewing tables, one a piece of MDF and one a hollow-core door, both painted with oil-based floor paint in an oops colour from Home Depot. The table "leg" visible in this picture holds Burda WOF and Ottobre Women pattern magazines on the bottom, children's Ottobre mags in the middle, and miscellaneous clothing and diaper patterns on the top. The two batting-covered cubes to the right of the home-shopped black shelf are footstools that I've been meaning to recover for months upon months; they are from Canadian Tire and were formerly covered with reed, however they started to break down and I took the reeds off. Here they sit. Someday they'll be finished.

In the meantime, now that I've found my crucial bookshelf, the organzing of the sewing room can continue. Onward ho!

This post is linked to Works for Me Wednesday.