Hello! Welcome to Workspace Wednesday. Emily here. This is my first ever Workspace Wednesday here on the October Afternoon blog. I am very lucky to have a scrap space in the refinished attic of our home. It's bright and big and perfect! We moved into our new (90 year old) home a year ago this week, and I still have probably six boxes of scrap-related stuff to unpack. Although it's been a year, I still don't feel like my space is as organized as I'd like it to be!! Right now the space is a mismatch of furniture and a mess of product. I must admit, however, that the area has seen a huge transformation from where it began! I thought I'd share some progress photos so you can see how the space has evolved over the last 365 days. Sometimes when I'm feeling glum about the state of the space, I look back and see how far it has come!
November 2013 - This first photo is from the listing photos when we bought our home. The previous owners had used the attic space as an office and as a space for their teenage children to just hang out. As you can see, the family that renovated the space did a fantastic job! I must note, because people always seem to see this photo incorrectly, there is NOT a giant hole in the floor. ;) The wood framed rectangle you see at the bottom of the photograph is part of the wall around the stairs that go down to the second level!
December 2013 - The first thing we did was set up the black IKEA Expedit bookshelf. In my previous space I had lower shelves, and we used the Expedit as a bookcase, but there was no place in the new house for it, so into my scrap room it went! My desk is also from IKEA, as well as the aqua kitchen cart. Okay - pretty much everything in this picture is from IKEA!
January 2014 - The content of my Expedit is always changing. I don't think I will ever be happy with how things are organized. At this point, most of my scrap supplies were still packed away and I was only scrapping with items that came from design teams. So, while the shelves may look relatively organized, they were only holding a fraction of my supplies! You can even see the tape that is still on my plastic drawers - meaning that at this point they hadn't even been opened since the move!
March 2014 - In March I got a cute little vintage serving tray that works perfectly to hold my washi tape holder (it's storage for storage!), my patterned paper, and various other supplies. At this point, the kitchen cart was over away from my desk. It didn't stay there long.
April 2014 - In April I purchased a giant piece of furniture for my space - a 10 drawer cabinet from the local store that sells old items from the University. I have no idea how my husband and I managed to get this huge thing up the stairs without killing ourselves! I can say this - it's probably never coming back down again! The cabinet is much deeper than it appears in the pictures. I still have a few empty drawers, but it stores my inks, punches, ribbon, stamps, paper pads, and all my embellishments.
August 2014 - Throughout the summer I continued to add things and change things. Here is a photo from the summer.
November 2014 - And finally - the most current photo of my Expedit shelves. I acquired a vintage 7-up crate that I need to fill. I also finally unpacked all of my boxes of embellishments and filled up most of my drawers. I moved around many items so that I could utilize my white plastic drawers better than I had done previously. I did not take a full photo of the desk and the floor because, well, it was pretty messy! ;) (Excuse the crazy color.)
And finally, here is one of my favorite little spaces in my area - it sits on top of my button cabinet on my desk.
Thanks so much for coming along on a little tour of my space over time! I hope it will continue to change and evolve and one day be perfect! For now, I am so thankful for my own place to create! I would love to see your spaces, too! Play along on Instagram by using the hashtag #OAWorkspaceWednesday. Have a great day!
