Welcome to my Girl Cave

Today, I'm going to post some Before pics of my room. It's not a big room, and I can't store anything in the closet yet, and I feel so cheated, LOL! This was my son's bedroom, and he still stores things in the closet. So... hope you are ready for the tour!

I'm going to post a few before photos and then hone in on my problem areas one at a time. Othewise, I might end up writing a book!

Standing in the doorway into the room

I have two tables in the room. One is behind the filing cabinet you partially see on the left and my main work table that butts up against the side. I have this worktable on bed risers so that I can put storage drawers under it. I needed to have this table free-standing so I could use both sides for storage. Essentially, you are looking at the 'back' of the work area.

This arrangement works well for me, even though I have to turn sideways to actually get around the end of the table to enter my work area. This happened because I brought in the much needed filing cabinet to hold my 8-1/2" x 11" paper stock.

So... things I must carefully consider

1. I live on the West Coast... that means Earthquakes! Thankfully, we don't have floods or tornados or hurricanes, but we do have some nasty wind storms and heavy rains at times as well as possible tsunamis generated from earthquakes. Water damage is not a worry as much as planning for avalanches of supplies during an extreme shaker.

2. I have several electronic cutting machines, so I need to be able to quickly move supply containers to accommodate the space needed to use these machines. I try to keep two on the 'back' of my worktable ready to go, but still need to clean up in front to insert the cutting mats.

3. I like having my supplies handy, but as happens with most of us, they always slowly encroach into your workspace.. I don't mind walking a few steps to get to supplies as long as they are organized to fit my workflow. I want to be able to put my hand on something I need quickly and easily, but I think I would prefer not to have it all on my table.

4. I am a messy person. By that, I mean, I tend to make piles of stuff. Doesn't matter what room of the house, there are Cathy Piles everywhere. I used to say I needed Exlax for the house to get rid of my piles. One main reason for my piles is that I am sometimes distracted from a project and start a new one, and I end up layering project supplies on top of eachother. Also, because I don't have a lot of room to even move around, there are parts of my storage that are covered by piles that I then need to move to put something away. Oh... it goes on and on!

Problem areas I would like to deal with

1. Inks: I think I could free up wall space and maybe get a pegboard system up if I relinquish my cassette tape unit and move my Stampin'Up inkpads and my Distress ink pads into the Elfa cart that hold all my other ink pads. The cart in right in front of me under the work table so they would still be easily accessible. Not as easy as keeping them in the cassette tape unit, but still they would then be zero steps away. That's a pretty easy experiment and will probably be first on my list to try.

Stampin' Up and Distress Inks on the wall

2. My rubber stamps are everywhere. Some are in drawers, some are in notebooks, some in the filing cabinet and some are in a portable file case, in bookcases and definitely not in the same area.

3. Ribbon... ribbons make babies. They're like bunny rabbits, LOL! That's all I'm going to say.


For now I'm going to go back to my cave and see what I can get done. I've gotten most of my 'Before' shots done and now I can try to get some straightening out done.


'til my next post... and maybe some 'After' photos... stay inky!