Three builders and an IKEA catalogue

You may remember this picture of our living room

Well we've got all our building approvals and wotnot, and chosen a man who can - make straight edges to holes in walls for new doorways! The garage is nearly empty, just need to sell my old bike and move more bits into the sheds. We now have two mini sheds outside the kitchen, and the summerhouse - never truly sure of its identity (summer living room? Meditation room? Studio? Model railway room?) is now our posh bike shed, green roof and everything!

And I've been busy with the catalogue of all things flat-pack and my squared paper, planning to the millimetre exactly what is going where. Fun fun fun, I used to spend hours doing this sort of thing when I was 10. Should have been an architect.

And with two weeks until New Town Art Collective hang an exhibition at the Greenstede Gallery, East Grinstead, for which I have no new work, I thought I'd use my half-term break to empty my cupboards and desks ready for the Great Furniture Merrygoround that will keep things like the piano out of the way of builders and the ensuing dust.

Look at all those empty shelves and drawers...the stuff still inside the cupboard is all in crates and can be moved out tout suite when we need to dismantle (!!!!) the desk.

The cupboard in the way of the squiggly red line in the living room is quite an important one to shift early on, natch - can't have that sitting in the doorway to my studio! Let me say that again. MY STUDIO. 

I have had to make some hard decisions along the way

Pots of bits? Foily bits? Fabric bits? Leaf skeletons and dried petals?? I know exactly what at least one person reading this would say to do with it all...and she may be right.

But I've also found things like my Grandmother's pin box, and my Mother's needle cases and tatting shuttles...

I've kept out a supply of materials to finish off some work (I will do it, I just need a stupidly short deadline) and I've also kept out some books that I got the last 18 months or so, that I haven't read properly yet (where does the time go?). The rest of everything is either stacked in the office or in the loft. Mr G has expressed concern that one room, even all for me, already won't be big enough before we've even started...

Oops, sneaked in a box of shells there...sshhh

But then we took a cupboard over to Mrs B's workroom - the wonderful Mrs B who has agreed to buy my enormous sewing cupboard and two other sets of drawers (she's hankered after a cupboard like mine for years, she says) and her work room and the volume of STUFF EVERYWHERE beats mine hands down. I don't know if he was relieved, or worried that it was a glimpse into the future, as Mrs B has a head start on a few years over me....