Pattern: Own design
Materials: Around £10 worth of screws, Scrapstore paint, scrap/waste wood, IKEA furniture oddments, old family table, posturite desk I had already and random table that was in the garage already. Many planks of wood reclaimed from the old garage roof
Time: I began work on the fittings and paintwork towards the end of February
Cost: £15 for paint and fabric from the Scrapstore, everything else was waste wood left in the garage by the house’s previous occupants or furniture I had already

This is how the studio looked before I did anything to it, right after the builder had finished turning it into a room:

After a lick of paint and about 18 tonnes worth of home-made shelving, this is what we have:

And just when you thought there couldn’t possibly be anymore storage areas in this room:

I give you this small and beauteous, own-design unit, complete with cleverly concealed wire-basket thing behind it.

This has been a very empowering project. The Man was away for the past fortnight so I have done everything here myself. It’s not that normally I would rely on him to perform all the DIY tasks; not at all. But there are certainly tools that I fear and despise and that are, frankly, just too heavy and unwieldy for me to manage. But his absence forced me to conquer my terror of the jigsaw (it is the tool of satan) and the hammer drill, (I love the power of it, but oh my poor crippled wrists) and to devise genius ways of determining whether or not I have achieved right-angled-ness without a second pair of eyes to help me decide.

I’ve also found it empowering in terms of how I’ve been able to create storage matched exactly to my requirements without having to compromise according to the rules and variants of someone else’s design.

And it’s been really exciting to work within a set of rules, also: to use only wood immediately available to hand and to use paint that I got from the Scrapstore only. It has led to an aesthetic I wouldn’t have come up with otherwise; a rough-edged, slightly wonky but thoroughly sold space filled with soft whites, creams and greens and ready for me, at last, to start filling with my craft-related bits and bobs, my sewing stuff, and some new work.

Here’s to new beginnings and all the things I’ll be able to make now that I have a space to make them in!