Crafty bonus

We lived in a modern terrace house for nine years. It was new when we bought it, well planned and light-filled but it had a steep set of stairs that my knee found increasingly hard to climb. My specialist advised that we needed to move to a house without stairs and so began the search for something suitable. We looked at hundreds of houses each more depressing than the last. But finally, just when we had given up hope of ever finding something suitable, we found the one.

We moved into our new house seven months ago and it is everything we imagined it would be and more. As Rob said "moving house is the best thing we've done in a long time". So, what's so special about this house?

Well, I knew the kitchen was amazing, there is so much storage space we still have empty cupboards and drawers.

And I knew the beautiful covered deck was going to be put to good use for most of the year.

But what I didn't know was that I would get the spare room just for me and my craft supplies. In the old house the spare room was upstairs and it had Rob's guitars, the sofa bed and the second TV in it. My scrapping supplies lived in an upstairs cupboard and in corner of the room off the kitchen (although designed to be a small family room, we never knew what to call this room as it wasn't a particularly useful space). I scrapped at the dining table.

Our new house has a proper family room with space for the TV and sofa bed so the desk and the credenza and my scrapping cubes moved into the spare room, referred to as the study. Added to this were the CD racks and a bookcase that didn't fit into Zoe's new room. It should be crowded but it's not. It has a big picture window that looks over the garden and lets in the morning sun making it light, airy and welcoming.

Now, the other thing our new house has is the most enormous garage with internal access. The walls are lined and there is a proper ceiling as well as large windows, plenty of shelves and a long work bench. It could easily fit four cars in it but we just have one car and a motor bike.

So, what to do with all that room? Well... It has become Rob's studio. The former work bench houses all manner of recording gear and there is plenty of room for multiple guitars and amplifiers. So what does this mean for the room formally known as the study? It's officially become the craft room and it's all mine!

The funny thing is, even though it's been officially my space since October last year, I haven't actually set it up yet. When we were unpacking boxes it hadn't been acknowledged that this room would become all mine so I just slotted stuff in where it fitted. Two and a half shelves of the linen cupboard also house my supplies and more albums.

Life got busy as it does, I had my first knee surgery and then graduations and formals and Christmas and visitors propelled us through December, January and February and by the time March rolled around it was time for my knee replacement surgery. During this time the room proved it can also accommodate a single bed as long as you don't want to access anything else in the room!

But, now my knee is starting to improve and life is settling down again, this room is my project. I'm going to create a well set up craft room that is a delight to be in and more importantly is a creative and encouraging space.

I'm really excited but I don't want to rush in and create a huge mess. so, I'm pacing myself, the first item on the agenda is to empty all those LO-filled pizza boxes into albums. Stay tuned for more updates.