Nesting

The trouble with having a lot of hobbies, particularly hobbies that require an awful lot of tools and so forth, is that you take up a lot of space. It's very easy to let stuff accumulate and spread; before you realise it has taken over your entire house. This is problematic when you live in a small house, like we do. We keep buying storage solutions, keep meaning to properly organise things and put stuff away, but it is difficult. Especially when we spend all our time in one room.

We get into the habit of forming "nests" around our chairs. Furniture and floor alike would get buried beneath boxes of Warhammer miniatures, cross stitch kits, computer game boxes and anything else we had lying around from a project picked up and then put to one side. To combat this creeping tide of mess, we bought bookcases. And boxes. Lots of them. We have a whole room upstairs which is only used for storing things. All of my sewing and dressmaking things live up there, along with a large collection of Warhammer miniatures (as yet untouched). Board games, computer games, the main computer. All of my art materials. The double bass, cello and violin. Basically, most of the stuff we don't use very often!

But none of that organisation helps the mess in the living room. It's where we spend most of our time, and we like to engage in crafty activities while watching TV. So Jamie's side of the room becomes a nest of Warhammer models, paints and modelling tools, while I create a nest of yarn. The Warhammer nest was solved with the judicious application of a small, wide, deep bookcase. It slots neatly under the stairs and has so much space on it for all the things we need to keep to hand.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, I was spreading further and further out, yarn and half-finished projects all over the place. I'd completely taken over the spare sofa, and was rapidly extending my territory until I was, at one point last week, occupying at least half the room with all of my crochet stuff. Despite arguing many times that we just don't have the room for one more bookcase (at last count, we had nine in our two-up, two-down terrace), I managed to convince Jamie that we had the space for another one. And here it is:

Look at all that lovely space for my stash! I'd best get buying more yarn! Alright, at the moment it's hidden behind a Christmas tree (we had to pull it out to get the new bookcase in next to the other one), which makes accessing it tricky, but that's only for a few more days and then we're back to normal.