My next blog post was SUPPOSED to be “All About my Vintage Diva Skirt” – but I must interrupt this planned series about my custom made Victorian Bustle Dress Designs to share some exciting news with you…
We’ve been looking for quite a while! For a variety of reasons – the fact that we really wanted to purchase a historical home, the state of the housing market in the area of New England that we live in, the amount of space we would need for my business, and admittedly my own pickiness, it’s been quite difficult to find something within our price range.
But we finally found something! It’s technically a Colonial-era home, but it was updated and expanded during the late-Victorian era, thus there are a lot of historical details to it that I absolutely love! It’s an extreme fixer-upper, and I’ll be sharing photos of our projects here as we undertake them – the ones that relate to my business or the Steampunk/Victorian themed ones, that is!
There’s a standalone garage building – with a story and a half over top that will will be utterly amazing for my business since it’s 100% separate from our home. Any home-based business owners out there will be very familiar with the challenges – it can be hard to separate working-time and relaxation-time well enough to truly be able to relax when you work from home. The over-garage studio is a long-and-involved project for the future, however. Like – it needs more than just paint, it needs non-plywood floors!
The house has a walk-up attic that’s finished, however, and it’s really a neat-looking spot! Eventually I’ve promised the kids that it will be their “video gaming room” – but for now, I can store most of what I keep ready-to-ship in my business up there. Our first project was to repaint the steeply sloped ceiling and the dormer walls to white:
The existing paint job was in good shape, but it was yellowish beige, which is very bad for taking photos! It makes silver accents look tarnished, turns purple shades to plum, and gives reds this weird orange sheen. It’s SO much better if I have the option to take a quick photo to show someone something (or to share on social media) with accurate colors, and without having to set up a lightbox!
My favorite part – even now in this temporary setup, my dress form mannequin is able to have a permanent location where I can put things on it to take pictures:
I used to have to pull it out from a corner behind other things and set up a temporary backdrop to be able to take pictures!
My sewing room is going to be our spare bedroom for now, and that’s the next project on our list. The people who lived in our house before attached a bunch of stuff to the walls and ceilings with a staple gun! I’ve already gone over every square inch of the spare bedroom with a variety of tools (pliers, a flathead screwdriver, and a paint scraper) in order to remove an absolute cubic butt ton of staples and broken staple bits – but that left behind a landscape of scratchy poky plaster. AKA death to lace. ☠️
I put all my fabric rolls inside heavy duty long bags to move them, and they’ve gotta stay in the bags until that room is safe!
Until my husband and I are able to set aside enough time to complete the sanding, hole-filling, and painting, I’ve been catching up on computer work – both for my business, and for the Indie Sellers Guild – the nonprofit advocacy organization for creative small businesses that I helped found.
And I’ve done some sewing from my dining room, which is honestly what I’m used to, as that’s where I used to sew when we lived in the apartment.
I will be ecstatic to finally have truly dedicated space for my very space-intensive business!