Nesting, anyone?

I discovered this in my drafts and had to laugh. Thought I'd share it with y'all so you can laugh at me, too. I truly, truly thought I had tons of time before this baby came. This post was written in APRIL, folks. I was barely even pregnant then. Not only did I do this revamp of the studio, I was busy perusing Craig's List for car seats, strollers, baby bumper sets, toys and newborn clothes of all kinds (I just don't have pictures of any of that stuff...). And then the nesting wore off, and I was busy doing nothing to prepare until--whoops! Baby's here! And now we're scrambling. So while I rearrange the linen closets and frantically throw together the crib, read and look and giggle at me, way back when...

Despite the fact that it is clearly too, too early in this pregnancy for me to be doing any nesting of any kind, I was finally (at loooooooooooooooooong last, if you ask my suffering husband) overwhelmed with the debris and inspired to just go spend the money at Ikea, already.

Here's a before shot of one corner of the studio:


Seriously. No, not staged. No, not especially or unusually bad. It really looked like this, with disturbing frequency. And before you run off with cries of "Slob!" I should point out that the major contributing factor was a LACK OF SPACE. You can't really clean if there isn't anywhere to PUT stuff.

Now check out the After*:


God bless Ikea. I LOVE the shelves, since they give me plenty of space to organize all the crap that was stuffed in the garage for so long--and I save a PILE of time by not going out and in and out and in. I never knew how much time was lost that way! I'm crazy insane for the green board boxes--they hold all the zippers, buttons, elastic, etc so I never have to dig anymore. I've got all this season's fabrics right where I can reach them, and see what I need to reorder. I've got a hanging rack (out of view) for works in progress and things ready to ship out. All my fabric scraps are organized in the wonderful Antonius in ROY G BIV order, so I can always find just what I need... My ironing board is now facing the window so I can watch our toddler when she plays outside.

I love my new studio. I just know it'll transform my LIFE.

*In the interest of full disclosure, in which I believe more-or-less deeply, I didn't take the after photo back in April, so the "After" is wayyy after. It's held up well, though, and I think that's a testament to my organizational skillz. And the studio has, in fact, transformed my life and my productivity level. Go, Sweden.