Off.

Did you hear that, when I finally finished? I just completed a major project on my journey to a less cluttered house (which is all part of our devious plan to get a dog).

My office/sewing room is a pretty big room with a large window front. My desk and my sewing table stand at a right angle to the windows, what is left of the walls has bookshelves and cupboards and some chests of drawers. This leaves a pretty big space in the middle, which got constantly more and more cluttered. No crafty person has ever enough storage space, neither does any teacher, and the combination is a lot. Any attempt at cleaning up was doomed to fail since I didn’t have any storage space.

I finally got fed up and decided to do something about it. Especially since the master plan is to get the house into a state where it’s possible to add a fluffy four legged family member to the mayhem. The idea was to take some chests of drawers the right height to work on them standing, out them back to back with some space in between, and then add two desk tops to make one big surface.

Problem 1: the Ikea Malm chests either come in 80cm (too low) or 100 cm (too high). I finally went for the 80 cm and added feet, which was no easy feat, since Ikea furniture is not made for “unauthorised” changes. We had to add some pieces of wood with some metal angles to create enough surface to add the hardware store feet. Halfway through I was like “fuck that shit, we’ll return the one chest we haven’t opened yet and get kitchen cupboards, they come with feet, but then I saw the price tag and decided, I could stick with my original plan.

Problem 2: The original plan was to create a surface of 1.6m x1.6m. While this fitted, it made the room too cramped. We finally decided on 1.4×1.6. Now the ready made desk tops were too large and need to be returned. It wanted to buy some solid wood panels, but they absolutely don’t come in the sizes I need. I’d have to buy 4 pieces of  40cm x 200cm  and then have 60 cm cut off each panel. This seemed like a lot of waste, plus it would cost another 150€, so I decided on two laminated boards that would fit in between, which leads us to ….

Problem 3: The Malm chests are pressed flake boards where you have little chance of adding a decent screw. In the end we glued and screwed some strips to the backsides of the chests so the boards can rest on top. At this point I was ready to throw everything out of the window. This works, kind of, but I think I’ll have to bite the bullet and buy those wood panels. In the end, it just took 4 more days to clean everything up, but look at this!

I finally have the possibility to clean up, let’s hope it stays that way.