Tidiness bug strikes

Well, somehow the work on the cupboard of doom has sparked a need to tidy the house up. This has rapidly evolved into a full blown attack of cleaning and sorting that has seen the dog wandering from room to room in confusion or peering warily at me from whichever perch she has found to sleep on, lest she get accidentally tidied up too.

There is not a room that has been unaffected and I'm not finished yet. I still need to do more in the sewing room and need to have a ruthless cull of the wardrobe.

Of course, all this tidying has created a need for storage solutions and where better to seek such solutions than Ikea. So off I went to Ikea on Saturday with a list, and measurements and a clear idea of exactly what I was going to buy. There was a budget involved somewhere in this too. I only wanted boxes, bags and a shelving unit for the cupboard of doom.

BUT....

There in the store was the ideal shelving unit to go under the stairs. The exact thing I had envisaged placing there when I'd been clearing the area out. So it came home with me, and here it is in all its glory. Its called Traby and this combination consists of one four cube unit with two single cubes attached to it.




It looks a bit bare right now, as this was just after I'd built it, so things haven't yet migrated onto it. I got a bit confused in the store and came away with the two lovely brown woven boxes that you see in the photo... but when I got them home they weren't the size I thought they were. They were supposed to fit neatly inside the cubes, which they clearly don't. So, I need to go back to the store to get some baskets the right size. There will be two baskets inside the cubes which will hold my craft things in progress downstairs (hand sewing, knitting etc). The remainder of the shelves will hold recipe books and sewing books eventually, including my Marfy catalogues which are such works of art that they should be somewhere they can be seen.

One of the brown woven boxes now contains all my cassette tapes. The other holds all my (rapidly expanding) beading supplies. So not a waste at all and I think they look rather good sat where they are. The white boxes on the bottom shelf hold all my CD's. Which means, for the first time in a long time, I can see actually find all my music, and I found things I didn't know I still owned.

The cupboard of doom has been dealt with and now has a smart shelving unit within it, although only small elements of this can be seen as its already groaning under its burden of stuff. Its a grey metal one which has graduated shelves so it has a deep shelf at the bottom and progressively narrower ones as you go up the unit. Should anyone be wanting such a thing, its name is Lerberg.

I have started on the workroom but not got all that far. I did, however, purchase some wonderful zip loc bags from the Ikea kitchen department and I cannot recommend these highly enough for yarn. I got the tip from Ravelry and have organised almost the entirety of my yarn crate into these bags. They are really strong and the zips are double and seal well so I was able to put the yarn into the bag, sit or kneel on the bag, zip it up and it was vacuum sealed. The yarn bags are now stood upright in the crate and can be rifled through the way you would patterns in a drawer. The yarn is easily visible and neatly stored, and even more importantly, safe from dust and moths. I really enjoyed sorting and petting all the yarn as well. On my return trip to Ikea I will get more of these bags in different sizes as I can see many uses for them in the work room and in the kitchen. I think I may also put some of my patterns into these bags as well.

Now all I need to do is find a better storage solution for my ever increasing bead collection. By the time I'd got to the storage section in Ikea my brain had shut down totally and I couldn't think straight enough to choose something. Which may well be the reason why my woven boxes are not the correct size.