Mom's Room - Keep Out

As your kids grow older you start to realize that they slowly take over your house and before you know it they know what is in all your drawers and closets better than you do.  The one place in our house that I've kept sacred is my office, since I telecommute for work I like to have a very clear line between work and home.  I am rarely in my office when the kids are home and awake and the door remains closed.  Because of this my office has become a large junk drawer where we hastily stash anything we want to keep away from the kids.  Not that this is the right place for these things it's just a convenient place to stash things.  Last November I finally decided that needed to change and began to clear out the excess and look for ways to better use my space for the things I love.

McKenzie was kind enough to make me this sign for my office door so everyone is clear whose space the offiec is.  

As part of my room revamp I finally painted the walls that have needed painting since we moved in almost eight years ago.  I contemplated for a long time and finally settled on a light Tiffany's blue which gives the room a warm cheerful glow on even the most dreary of days.  I also moved out some extra furniture and have been looking for better ways to store the items that we do want to keep in there.  One of my main goals was to be able to actually use my scrapbook supplies at home instead of just when I go to a retreat.  This requires good storage and a space where I can leave a project out if I don't have time to finish in one sitting.  

For Christmas my Dad helped to build me a scrapbook workstation with a large countertop and two storage shelves below.  This is perfect for storing a lot of my supplies as well as giving me a much larger work space to have all my tools reachable when creating pages.  I also received some larger storage shelves specifically made to hold scrapbook sized papers which allows me to easily find the things I want to create a page.  

I have a long way to go in getting things fully organized but the addition of these two areas to my office has made it possible to more effectively use the space and allowed me to fit more scrapbooking into my daily life.  There is plenty of daily tasks in my declutter calendar that will focus me on my office so I'm continuing to take it one day at a time and enjoying each space that I can repurpose or improve along the way.  Maybe I'll even consider letting the kids in my office to do a few projects with me this year!