Sunday, September 12, 2010

My "Sewing Room"

Well, if you look closely at some of my photos, you may notice a stove, microwave, cat food dishes, and more crazy non-craft room type items.  So, I feel like a tour and some explanation might be helpful.  As most of my readers already know (being my friends and family!), I live in Washington, DC, in the lovely (but pricey) Capitol Hill neighborhood.  As such, I pay a small fortune for a tiny 2-room apartment.  My second room is my bedroom (and the room with all my clothes and shoes storage (i.e., dressers and shelves for shoes).  The first room is my kitchen, dining room, living room, crafts room, office, guest room, and kitty's room.  Oh, and there's more storage in here, too.  How is this possible, you might ask?  Years and years of spaceship-style living is the answer.  Here is the evidence:  Starting at the front door and going clockwise around the room:
That's the front door on the left and my TV and printer cabinet on the right.  The large TV and the stand it is on are leaving my apartment ASAP.  One of my dining chairs will go there instead.
I am lucky to have 11-foot ceilings in this room, as well as 7-foot high windows.  The drapes are 118" tall!
So this is the living, office, guest room section of the room.  The blind is up a bit on the right so that kitty cat has a place to check out passers-by, of all human, animal, and vehicle varieties.
Oh, right, and bike storage!  This cabinet is for kitchen stuff, books, and supposedly for decoration, but I've never set it up in this apartment.  In the frames are some Japanese quilting/embroidery sashiko samples I made a number of years ago.
This cabinet is my coat and utility closet, as well as a great accessory for the sewing/crafts aspect of this room.  The door goes to my bedroom.
This is the kitchen, dining, crafts part of the room.  Oh, and you can see kitty's stuff under the table.  The table is a cherry dining table my parents gave to me more than 10 years ago.  I love it, and the custom table pads are great for pressing and other crafts uses.
You can see that ALL of my counter space is taken up with my dish drying rack.  That's one of the more frustrating aspects of this room.  I have my coffee pot on the stove and my microwave on the dining table.
And here's the front door again!  You can see my keys on the table by the door.
One last thing: I wanted to show you the cool ceiling medallion, chandelier, and crown molding in the room.  I painted the room green myself.  Not sure the next tenant will like it, but the room really needed painting!

Hope you enjoyed the post!

4 comments:

Alicia said...

I'm seriously impressed with how much utility you've gotten out of such a small space while, at the same time, keeping it looking lovely. And that table is gorgeous!

IowaHoodlum said...

Thanks Alicia! Another neat thing about that table is that it is really adaptable to the task at hand. At the moment, I have the leaf in, but I can also decrease the size of the table to make it smaller. And, the sides also fold down. So at its smallest, the table seats 2, and at its largest, I can can seat 10! More if you squeeze. Too bad I don't have that many chairs... :-)

Anonymous said...

I love the way you used your space. Have you considered submitting your apartment on ApartmentTherapy.com?

IowaHoodlum said...

Hi Amy,

Thanks for your post! No, I have never thought of that before. I will look up the site and see if I might want to submit. Could be entertaining! :-)