Sewing Room Part 1: Choosing

Hi Everyone,

I realized that a blog post about my new sewing room would be gigantic, as there is lots of thoughts and photos that I want to share, so I'm going to break it down into three separate posts:

The first one about choosing

The second one about planning

And the third one about the finish

Let's go back to August.  Our offer on this house was accepted on the nineth and we weren't going to close until the end of September, so that left me lots of time to plan, and I spent most of it planning my new sewing room.

The first decision I had to make was where to locate it.  There are three bedrooms upstairs and also a huge, finished basement.  The trouble with the basement is that it is one large, long room with an office, storage room, bathroom, and furnace room opening off.  It is plenty bright as it is a walk-out, so that wouldn't be a problem.  It's just that I couldn't section off a spot easily.  One end had the door to the office and was right at the bottom of the stairs, and the other end had sliding glass doors outside.  Neither would work, so I shifted my attention to the bedrooms upstairs.  

The pictures I'm going to share here are the only ones I had at the time.  They are from the listing and the furniture, etc. belongs to the previous owners.  Yes, I neglected to take pictures while we were looking.  I did in the beginning of our search, but as my focus on the houses intensified, my attention to the camera diminished.

The first bedroom faces the front of the house and has a spectacular arched window.  I thought the window would add lots of light.

The major drawback is that this is the smallest of the bedrooms, and I really didn't think I could fit in everything I wanted.

The other two rooms are side-by-side at the back of the house.  The first belonged to a college-age daughter.

You enter the room through the door, the window wall is on the far wall, and the closet is on the same wall as the door, extending to the right.

The other room is just the same but flipped so that the closet extends to the left of the door,  This room was decorated for the couple's baby granddaughter.  

Since the front bedroom was much smaller, I focused in on these two rooms.  I had some approximate measurments that were on the listing, however, it just gave the room sizes, it didn't say which room was what size.  Just for your information, the small room is 11x 12.5 feet and the other two are 14 x 12.5 and 14 x 13.5.

I didn't necessarily want the biggest room, for me the layout was more important. I could tell from the pictures above that the window walls both had the window centered, with maybe 45" of wall on either side.  The side walls in both rooms had no doors or windows, but what I wasn't sure about was the closet walls and how the door into the room impacted the space.  

When we had the home inspection, I went back with my camera and a measuring tape.  I had a list of measurements I wanted to take, (primarily for the refrigerator as we needed to get one) so I took more pictures of the upstairs rooms.  

This is the door/closet wall of the college-age daughter's room.  You can see that there is a step-back from the door.  The corner isn't shown, but the closet door ends with less than 5 inches of wall before the corner--that means that if I want to have a solid wall of shelves, etc. in my sewing room, this room won't work because one wall has the closet, one the window, one would have the door in the way, and the other doesn't have enough space at the end of the closet.  It's hard to explain, but maybe you can visualize it.

The baby's room had an ideal layout.

You can see that the closet door ends and there is about 29" of wall before the corner.  This means that the wall with the crib on it could be entirely filled with cabinetry.

This last photo captures where the doorway is postitioned.  Once I scrutinized both rooms, it was very clear that the purple room would be my sewing room.  It was also very clear to me that it wouldn't stay purple and pink!

Next time I'll discuss the planning phase.  What were my needs and my wants and how it all came out.

Have a great day!

JoAnne