Sewing Room Overhaul for the New Year

Well, this wasn't really a New Year's Resolution.  I've been working up to this for about two and a half years now!  (Dated by a post on October 14, 2012, on which I reported step #1.)

The room had become nearly impossible to work in, let alone walk through.  The terrible clutter was "caused" by:
Kids joining our family.  I had been using 2 bedrooms, and then squished everything into this one.
Quilt repair business expanding (yea!), plus also adding in costuming and vintage clothing repair.
Business things squeezed into snips of available time, plus cleaning is not my forté.

Here are before and after photos.  Yes, I am being brave enough to share the ugly before photos!

  

The biggest change was to move my acid-free quilt storage boxes upstairs to my daughter's mostly empty closet.  This freed up a good deal of space, under tables and in the sewing room closet.  I put an empty dresser from her room underneath the worktable for projects in progress.  I didn't get rid of a ton things, just a few garbage bags full.  It was mostly putting away and restructuring.

The results are absolutely lovely.  The airy openness is beautiful beyond belief.  It was definitely a time warp experience, eg. uncovering projects planned and started 20-ish years ago that I now have absolutely no desire to complete, a real measure of how I have grown as a person and an artist over the intervening years.

It's still a very full room.  But it's now possible to walk between the tables and I don't have to gingerly reach under the ironing board for fabrics, and so on.  Here's the tour:

  

And here are the acid-free boxes in the upstairs closet.  The righthand side holds costuming supplies.

This is a lovely perk to having my kids grown up and moving along in their own lives in other cities......and I'm glad to occasionally find some perks to help me adjust a bit more happily to the empty nest.