Dream Quilting Room and a Trip Down Memory Lane

What does your dream sewing room look like?

or this:

Well, it is time for me to put a dream into reality. But, will designs I love work in my own space and within my budget.....

I am SEW excited and also kinda sad. Tomorrow the contractor will begin the process of knocking down bedroom walls in our upstairs to expand my quilting room. Yes, a dream sewing room! I am SEW excited to get a much larger area just for me, but sad to think how our three kids and even some grandkids used to call these three bedrooms home. Now it will be one big room to accommodate my long arm and all my sewing machines, nice big cutting table, and plenty of storage for my stash and all those other gadgets we love to have. How time changes our lives.

I cherish those days when kids were snuggled in beds in these rooms and we have so many wonderful memories from those years. All three of our "kids" have homes of their own now and our youngest grandchild is 13 years old. The fun days of seven grandkids spending the night with us is just a memory now. Five grandkids are now in college and working - so spending the night with grams and gramps are just memories to cherish. 

One day, right before Christmas, I was upstairs in my little quilting room complaining how about how small my little cutting table is. Hubby asked why I made such a small one. I laughed and said just where would you put a larger one in here? He must have really pondered over this cause the next day he suggested we tear down all the walls and make one big room! "Are you kidding? Oh my gosh, that would be a dream come true!!!!" Well, he wasn't kidding - he scheduled it to happen - REALLY! 

Now, you would think I would be over joyed, but it actually made me sad to think we really are empty nesters. How did that happen so fast? Where did all the years go? Can you relate??? Well, my excitement to have so much space and planning everything quickly perked me up! Out comes the graph paper and tape measure to plan the layout. It brought me back to over 30 years ago when we had the graph paper out were drafting the house layout and trying to squeeze four bedrooms in upstairs so each of our kids could have their own room. And now here we are deconstructing those very rooms we worked so hard to make fit. Wow, I spent a lot of time going down memory lane.

Then I realized I now have closets to empty and furniture to figure out what to do with. I will lose two closets in this process and I don't know about you, but as soon as the kids move out things just appear in those empty closets over night. 

We have a little office downstairs that we will move our antique iron bed into and an antique chest. I will keep one antique dresser/mirror in the sewing room and use it for storage. We will have to build some storage for all my sewing stuff and yarn that I have been storing in those two closets. For now, everything is going in tubs. Hubby says I will be out of commission for sewing for a couple of months. I just laughed! HaHa, he doesn't know us quilters that well. Out comes my folding table and up goes my sewing machine in the living room! A few months without sewing - NOT HAPPENING!