I noticed last night that summer’s light is waning at the end of the day. The daylight is slowly fading at an earlier hour, a little bit each day. Surely this is a sign of how quickly this season is passing. After a trip to Target last night, with half of the back to school merchandise sold out, it solidly cemented the fact that all of the summer projects that you set up to accomplish… have not been finished! I am being a little too harsh, so let’s go with half of the projects. All kidding aside, this topic touches on a blog post that I have been crafting concerning expectations which will be published in the not too distant future. How come we so often measure ourselves by what we did not accomplish instead of what we have? Until then, I wanted to keep you posted on the Artist Studio progress. The above picture of the exterior of the artist studio is the prettiest one of the bunch that you will see in this post for Part 2 of the artist studio revitalization. Part 2 is all about the nitty gritty task of purging and getting the junk out of the space that had collected there in lieu of the garage. “Everything has a place and there IS a place for everything,” has always been my mantra… now living up to it has always been the challenge. In the first part of this series, I just showed you what had become of the space in this amazing building. Now I am going to show you how we made heads or tails out of what had been collecting in this building and how we processed the stuff and determined its next home.

First we picked up each and every object and decided if it fit into one of the following categories all of which began with a G so they are easy to remember:

1.  Goodwill

2. Garage

3. Gifted

4. Garbage

5. Gets to stay

To make this job less laborious, collect bags or boxes and set up in an organized fashion so you can pop the items right into its proper container to be moved to its new home.

Label the bags if you want so you do not forget what goes where. When sorting trash, of course set up a recycling bag where all of those items can go instead of in the trash bag.

Large items that cannot be put into bags or are too cumbersome for boxes can go in piles. The key here after divvying everything up is to immediately deal with it. Take the pile to donate to where you are donating it or at least land it in your car. Move that pile to the garage. Take all of the trash out. That task alone is liberating!

After you have assigned each object a new home, you should be left with all of the items that are going to continue to live in this space. Because this is such a large project of sorting through years and years of acquired stuff, much of which just moved with me 11 years ago, we are breaking it up into these parts so the task is not overwhelming. We left the materials in the artist studio that are art materials or supplies but they still need to be gone through to decide which ones are valid to my use of them today. When sifting through all of the materials, we will also decide what containers will be best suited to corral like with like while keeping the design aesthetic for this space in mind. That will be Part 3 of our series. 

To make the going through of all art materials when we get to that part of this project a bit easier, we are collecting all possible storage materials in one area of the artist studio and will continue to add to it based on the design of the space.

Some of the objects that we are collecting to house the stored items might pass muster, some might not. Some might get a makeover themselves. We will make those decisions based on what we need to store and at that step of the project.

In conclusion, it is important to take a big project and break it into doable little pieces. That way, you will feel a sense of accomplishment at each little step when you complete it. It also helps you to organize your thoughts and make good decisions as you take the project step by step. It is easier to take a couple of hours out of your day than a full weekend as we so often PLAN to do.  I often sit with my tear sheets for inspiration or Pinterest, Instagram etc. as well as my calendar to reasonably break these tasks up and to feel inspired at the same time.

Do any of you have a project that you are working on that you have broken up into small doable steps? How did you make out? Would love to know!

Happy project completion !

~Meg