Studio Reveal
Long time no blog! I’m very excited to tell you that in the three months since I last posted, we bought a house, did a ton of work on it, moved in, and, AND! I got my office set up. Hurray! Small Fry (who is not actually that small, eek) is taking some lovely long naps nowadays and I’m getting some work in again.
When we lived in Missouri from 2016-2017, I had a dedicated studio room but it was teeny; maybe 8x10 at most. From then on it’s been shared spaces; the baby/guest room, the kitchen table, etc. This new studio room is more like 11x11 and the extra square footage makes a difference! There are two lovely big windows (that’s one of the things we fell in love with here) and a generous closet for storage.
Thanks to all of the extra space, I’ve been able to make my dream desk come true (or pretty close, anyway!). My goal has been to have a shareable workspace so that I can have guests over to create with me. Maybe a NMTM tack party in 2020? We’ll see!
I already owned most of the storage pieces in the studio (fun fact - I am the 4th generation of my family to have the white hutch in the second photo!), but I planned and built my desk all by myself, and I am darn proud of it. The total cost for the desk area is pretty close to $160, but that total will go down a little bit. I didn’t need all of the melamine sheet I purchased for the desktop and I’ll sell the remaining square footage to my husband for use in the garage. This project was super simple - I just needed a drill and a screwdriver! (Well, there was some messing around with levels and stud finders, too)
To get this set up, I purchased the two cube shelving units at a garage sale for $5 each. The desktop is a melamine sheet from a Big Box Store - it was damaged, so I got it at a discount! They cut it down for me and we were able to arrange things so that the damaged area was discarded. The total for the melamine after discount and cutting was $23. I lucked out and went to Ikea for desk legs during a Family sale, so the cool sawhorse support was only $40 and the adjustable leg (you can see it in the last photo) was only $12. I found the adjustable stool in the scratch and dent section for half off (missing a foot and the bolt that keeps it adjusted), so I only paid $25! I then went and purchased $24 worth of casters to try to get a rolling stool, but alas - the angle of the chair legs makes it not roll very well. I suspect that I will end up replacing them with regular rubber feet and my husband has expressed interest in ‘buying’ the casters from the studio to use in his garage, so there won’t be much of a loss there. The pegboard arrangement came to right around $25, between the board and two sets of pegs.
In the future, I’d love to change up the “display wall” (second photo) so that I have a third workspace between two storage units. I’d swap out the open glass shelving for something enclosed and plop a desktop between it and the heirloom hutch. Figuring out where to put the printer from there could be tricksy, but it would be nice to leave the sewing machine out sometimes or have an area dedicated to casting (!!) and packing. We’ll see what happens!
