My Office & a Snow Day

We've been snowed in today with no electricity and I'm really glad we kept our wood-burning stove:

The power went out last night & we sleep in a pretty cool house so we didn't really notice it until this morning.  We got a fire going in the wood-burning stove and it toasted up our entire lower level, where the family-room-combination-office is.  We had breakfast (cereal with MILK! ;) at my work table and got all cozy by the fire.  I took the pic above with my cell phone & thought I could beat the power outage and post from my ipad but I couldn't figure out how to get the pic up from the ipad!  ah vell.

We took the kids out in the snow & Justin (above, 1) loooved it.   He was watching a snowball fight between Daddy & Christian:

{Yes, that's a snowball pelted at my 3 year-old's head.  My husband's a bit like Dumb & Dumber in the snow.  He hit me with one and it was seriously like a baseball...  I guess it makes us tough??? }

Anyway, onto the office.  I've been needing more storage and we have the room for it so on a whim we decided to go for these shelves (from Target) last night.  (We've beein toying with the idea of built-ins but want to keep the room open for alternate arrangements)  Dave made it home just before things got really crazy around here snow-traffic-wise. I'm thrilled with the results:

I haven't really organized it yet and I still have some empty cubbies.    Much of my gear is in our laundry room & Dave's work-out room so I'm going to bring out only the most-used items. 

(empty cubby hiding behind Schumacher bag ;)

I put my ink pads & stamps in this old hammered ice bucket and I know I'm just begging for little Justin to come explore.  (He loves to carry things with handles.) 

I've never really shown you what all is in my office so I thought I'd share some peeks.  Inside this little closet (which is next to the new cubby shelves) I keep some of my smaller fabric samples in color-coded clear plastic bins.  I prefer to pull my fabric swatches from their books unless it's a book of solids like linens or velvets:

{The printer & a bunch of other junk also lives in here.}

Larger fabric samples go in the hallway (most of them are Schumacher in case anyone spies anything they have to have in the pic;)  and are grommeted and attached with shower rings to curtain rods we hung: 

looooove my pretties...

...And just to keep it real, here's the view I never show:

I'm working on this spot.  I want to add more shelving up to the top and turn the whole area into the spot for my active client boxes, which store swatches & samples for each invidual client.  Completed job boxes go in a less-accessible area.  And that poor thing hanging on the wall is one big mess.  For now it houses all of the miscellaneous pads & notebooks I've accumulated so that I remember to use them...  but there's definitely a better way to use this space.   I'm getting there ;)

..Okay, and because I like to end positively, here's one last look at my new cubbies:

{Do you spy our candle collection??  Leftover from the power outage}

This little addition gave us some much-needed breathing room and I just love that feeling. 

I think I'll leave a couple cubbies empty for quick "mess stashes.." 

And I'm going to go now because I'm doing more organizing.  ahhhhh so happy.

 

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