Making Some Progress...

Many of you have been following along on the changes to our home that needed to happen to when we found out we were expecting our 6th child.  For those of you who are just joining in reading this, I'll give a little sum-up:).  We own a little 3 bedroom ranch with an unfinished basement that also holds, not only our now 6 kiddos, but also my business.  Before Israel was born, we were blessed with friends helping us build a beautiful bedroom for Matt and I in our basement! It was truly a gift and has allowed us to all have a bedroom to call home.  But, to fit that bedroom, it meant really changing my studio workspace and the play-space for the younger kiddos.  It has been a year of working through finding a way to gain some of that back.  It has been such a giant undertaking that we have been doing it in smaller parts, seeing how it worked and then making the necessary changes needed.

One thing we did months ago was get some good shelving up for my handmade items.


 That worked so well, that we just recently used the same type of shelving in my workspace, which has been so wonderfully functional and it isn't an eyesore since it is within the family room space now.  Here are a few pictures.  The wall of shelves are on the outside wall of our bedroom.

 This is my current workspace.  It is so far, the best functioning space I have had as of yet. I do still have a large cutting table behind where I am standing to take the shot-but that area is still under some reworking, so I will show pics of that when it is finished. It has been so wonderful to have two of my machines out again.  I use both of them all the time and my Bell is in there with me so much of the time too, it is nice when she doesn't need to wait to use the machine.

 I was able to sand down the round table and get it painted along with my cabinets.  The white helps lighten up the basement.

 Here are the new shelves.  They are on the outside wall of our bedroom.  They are making designing so much easier!

 Here you can see how it opens up to the family room.  Keeps me with the kids while I work-A MUST FOR ME!

 My sewing table fits so perfectly back in that corner-I love it!

Now this is the other project we have been working on slowly through out the year.  This space is on the other wall of our bedroom.  It is a tiny little area that has been the overflow so often of whatever is going on in the house.  It eventually will be a 2nd bathroom for us, but that is quite a ways down the road for us(yes, it is possible to function as a family of 8 with only one bathroom-haha).  Anyways, I have been working to widdle us down around here to only having things we used regularly.  We let go of a lot of toys collecting dust, alot of "maybe some day" things, etc.  And Cole and I have worked really hard on cleaning and organizing the garage multiple times to get a good space for his weight room, which used to be down in this space.  He really prefers to work out in the garage anyways.  So, finally we had a clear space to give the younger kids a room for playing.  We were able to purchase a carpet remnant to fit the entire room and have since then, been working on a layout for the kiddos to play, more on that later:) I am so thrilled to be on our way to having this space because since our bedroom was built, it has deeply grieved me that we had no space for the kids to have sleep overs!  Cole asked me one day in the middle of a moment of frustration as I was racking my brain to figure out where to store things, why this change was so important to me.  I just broke down in tears and told him, I want you kids to be able to have your friends over again. I have missed that so much!

This is the view from the other side.  You can see my loom there in the hallway.  We have just needed to go through so many changes as a growing family, and that has meant rethinking how we use this little house.  Trying to make it every inch useful, waste nothing.  The birth of Israel certainly spurred this on, but the fact that we also have two teenagers now, has changed alot of how we function as well.  The younger kids are not so young anymore either and as their interests have changed so quickly too. Who knew we could house 8 of us, homeschooling and a business in this little ranch we bought 8 years ago!  Pretty cool!