I can see light at the end of the dusty tunnel

We're making progress on the guest room/sewing room #2 renovations and I'm excited that I will soon be able to get back to sewing. The drywall will be finished today and this weekend I think we'll be priming the walls. It'll take a couple of coats since there's new drywall  on the walls and the once textured ceiling has a couple coats of drywall mud on it now to make it smooth. I'm so glad we're hiring contractors for this work because we simply don't have the energy anymore to put in a full day's work and then work on house renovations in the evening. I also enjoy coming home and seeing the progress. It's like a surprise every day and they're doing a very nice job.

It's been at times stressful but loads of fun to design these renovations. I especially love that I've been able to customize things to fit not only our taste but how we use the space. Since this guest room is also used for my some of my sewing activities, I have been able to make some design details that will be very useful for me.

The room is a basic bedroom. It had one rectangular window, which was fairly high up on the wall and a closet with two heavy, mirrored sliding doors on it. The bed has a pop-up trundle bed underneath it. My cutting table sets up in the middle of the room and pretty much occupies all of the space, so I'm glad it folds up and can be wheeled away.

The major change to the room was replacing the window with outswing French doors. The doors lead out to a full view of two peach trees and to what will be a deck, which will wrap around the side of the house to the right where the new window is located. This new window is taller, with a casement window below and an awning window on top for ventilation. The view from the new window looks out on our side yard fence (covered with a Jasmine bush) and the neighbors well-kept back yard. And we can finally see the hills! This is the only south facing window of our house that is not blocked by the neighbor's house. 

The pattern cabinet is a custom-made dream of mine. I used to have all of my patterns scattered throughout multiple cardboard and plastic organizer bins. Finally they will all be in one place. The cabinet replaces a much smaller bookshelf that was really a re-purposed small IKEA china cabinet. I will share pictures of the new pattern cabinet later when I do my big "reveal." The cabinet turned out a bit larger than I anticipated but it stores all of my patterns and has room for lots of sewing and knitting magazines. I also designed it with a pull-out shelf, which will be convenient for browsing the magazines or, as I've found, setting up my yarn swift and ball winder.

The other noticeable change is with the closet. The original closet had a standard clothing rod and some crooked wood storage shelves a previous owner put in. The new closet will have custom-built shelves, drawers and hanging areas and a pull-out ironing board. This ironing board is probably 20 times more expensive than your standard ironing board, but it'll be worth it. I had the contractor put in an outlet in the skinny wall space between the door and the closet so that it's handy to plug in the iron. Another custom change is with the closet doors, which will be triple doors on sliding tracks. Two doors will have mirrors on them and one will have a design board affixed to it. I plan to make the design board removable so I can change the fabric cover whenever I want to change the look.
There's still stuff to do like paint and refinishing the wood floors, and then I'll have the big task of organizing and putting things away. My first sewing project will probably be window coverings. The new doors and window let in a lot of light and although we bought them with super energy efficient glass, all that light will translate into extra heat too.

So there's an end in sight, and I am looking forward to it! It'll also be nice to finally be done (?) with the renovations inside the house, but I will have no excuse now for not cleaning things, especially dusting. The inside of the china cabinet is quite dusty from lots of floor refinishing and dry wall dust over the years, but as long as there was more to do....So I guess I'll be putting that on my to-do list now.