Who Needs A Dining Room Anyway?

The tour continues...

Once upon a time a few years back the second upstairs bedroom was my very own sewing room. It was a spare bedroom/sewing room for quite a while and then the day bed was sold and I got to use the space for sewing for a long time. It worked great for a while and I enjoyed working on projects upstairs by myself. I was set up with a TV and could have shows going in the background while crafting. Over the years I started to feel a little isolated and it was super cold upstairs and during the winter months and it took forever to heat up. 

Fast forward to 2015/2016 the walk in closet that we had was more of a hallway turned into a closet. It was hard to keep clean and organized. After many years of living with that mess I suggested that we turn the spare room into a dressing room. That idea was well received and we planned to start the conversion. However, that meant that my sewing stuff needed to go somewhere else. 

That natural somewhere else was the main floor. and the only space that made the most sense was the dining room or living room. After setting up my brand new Arrow Sewing Cabinet in both the Living Room or the Dining Room at different times I decided that the dining room was the better location, mostly because I could be near a window and close to the kitchen. Until this year my sewing adventures were minimal as I was working full-time which made it easy to store stuff on the cabinet since it is just another horizontal surface when it is all closed up and my machine is stored away.

Now that I am retired I have decided to set up "shop" in the dining room and leave my machine out and ready to go. I also have relocated the ironing board to the same space so I don't have to use the table top version. I have resurrected so many projects in the last couple of months that I can keep busy for a good long time.  

I finally finished the quilt on the wall - after 17 years of it sitting around.

View from the Living Room into what used to be the Dining Room

The space still needs some help, but I can make changes over time

There are still some things that need to be organized, but that will happen in time. For the past year or so I have been storing some fabric, miscellaneous tools and patterns on a card table in our front entry. We are not a front door household, back door guests welcome! 

Anyway, this space has been quite comfortable and I look forward to spending a lot of time here sewing and creating fun quilts and other crafts.

Tour

Well, I think it's time for a little tour of our home/farm. Today I'm sharing our Kitchen. This kitchen is not necessarily the most user-friendly space I've ever had in any house that we have lived in. I suppose that kitchen functionality wasn't a high priority way back in 1937 or maybe the original owner of this house wasn't much of a cook. Who knows?

Anyway, we are trying to fit modern appliances and work tables into the layout of the kitchen. To do that we had to take part of a cabinet away to get our updated refrigerator into the space. The stove is a stand alone, so it didn't require anything special. Come to think of it, the house came with the stove and fridge. The previous owner/realtor left the appliances for us. There isn't a lot that we could do to make this space more usable other than adding the Ikea table in January 2020. That table has made being in the kitchen more enjoyable. I can leave my Kitchenaid out and it has been used more this year than ever before. Before the table I would have to lug the mixer from a bottom cabinet and hoist it up on the counter. Okay, it's not that bad, but still. After a year of having this table I wonder why it took us so long to figure this out. 

When we first got the table we  had it situated as an extension of the counter. That was fine and all, but only one side of it could be used. So because I'm a thinker, I decided to make an "L" at the end of the counter and move a couple of things (coffee cart) to make things work out. Because of this move we are now able to get into the cabinet that houses the storage containers more easily. There once was a cart that sat near the stove, but blocked the cabinet. The cart also made it easy to be lazy about not putting containers away. The easy access makes the kitchen less messy now. 

The one thing that I would like to do is update the cabinets - not so much get new cabinets, but get new drawer pulls and maybe paint. The counter is super ugly, but we've lived with it since 1998. So, it's safe to say that we'll continue to live with it a while longer. 

One day we'll update the kitchen. For now we'll continue to make do with the space that has worked since the beginning. So many projects - so hard to choose. The kitchen is an important space, but the animal infrastructure is a little more important right now. 

Being retired really isn't so rough...:)