The William Morris Master List

This is another post in my effort to follow along with Pancakes and French Fries and the amazing William Morris project she's been working on, and encouraging others to work on too.

Okay, friends… a master list.

My apartment, seen below and to the right (terribly off-scale,but you get the idea) being a single lady in a major metropolitan area on a student budget, is the size of a shoebox, and only mine for another 3 months, as of tomorrow.  And I think I’m just now figuring out that the ticket to living in a shoebox is to stop thinking that a bedroom and a living room/kitchen area as having defined rooms like a house. 

A teeny apartment has zones, not rooms.  I have not defined them as well as I could have.

Entry… Cooking… Workspace…Lounging…Storage…Sleeping…Wardrobe...Craftspace.  You know, that sort of thing. 

They overlap, in a silly messy sort of way in my apartment, when they exist at all.  Horizontal spaces and chairs collect clutter, bookshelves overflow(did I mention I am in 19^th grade? Textbooks add up), and things get shoved places so often it’s comical.  Or, it was, before I realized that I’ve surrounded myself with flotsam and jetsam to the point where I don’t have space to live anymore.  So, as I forsee "shoebox living" for myself for the next few years, it’s time to rethink some zones, and things that will live in them.

Entryway:  space to store things that I take with me.  Where paper things land to be sorted, and things like a purse and keys can have a home.  Featuring a reminder board, and maybe(hopefully I’ll actually start going again) a gym bag.

Cooking:  My kitchen is teeny-tiny, and crammed full of food and the things used to prepare it. 

Food:  Store dry ingredients, snacks, spices, and sundry other things… in a pretty, functional way.

Cookware:  For a 24-year-old, I have a lot of it, gifts from my grandmother when she broke up housekeeping.  I want to be able to use it all, because heirlooms aren’t meant to be all pretty things that sit on shelves. The utilitarian stuff should all be just that: utilitarian.

Workspace:  My kitchen table is so much more, as kitchen tables must be in these itty bitty spaces. But mine is one of those horizontal spaces that just collects things much of the time…

Lounging: My coffee table already doubles as storage:  It’s also one of those horizontal, collecting-things places though. 

I have an easy chair I’d love to reclaim and slipcover/re-upholster, and the ottoman that goes with it. 

Storage/Crafting:

Here’s the thing…  I have hobbies.  I sew, I just learned to quilt, I make jewelry, and I’ve been known to collage and scrapbook.  All of those things come with supplies, and the supplies have a way of needing storage.

Fabric:  Cataloged, counted, and stored

Patterns:  ditto

Notions(zippers, thread, buttons… everything you need to sew clothes/quilts that isn’t fabric): Accessible when I need them, not scattered when I don’t.

Art supplies:  Separated from school supplies and stationery, and all of the above ready when I need them. 

Sleeping:  Keep it more for sleep, and make it pretty.

Wardrobe: The thing that started it all. More will show up on my sewing blog about wardrobe, because I’ll be sewing lots, if not all, of my new clothing in 2013.

Closet/Dresser:  Organized, and generally pared down to what is useful and beautiful

Accessories:  Ditto.  Make things/hunt vintage to fill in the holes.

So... yeah.

The goal this week is to conquer some paper and horizontal surfaces.  Paperwork is on the radar already, so I'm gonna move with the momentum.