Over the next few months, I will drastically reduce my work-away-from-home hours. Knowing I’ll have more time to delve into family history research, sewing projects, and the next great novel, I started seeing my home office with new eyes.

My family history research is in binders labeled with my ancestors’ surnames. The binders were stored alphabetically behind closed doors in a sideboard. Tidy, but not as easily accessed as they could have been.

Most of my fabrics and sewing ephemera were folded neatly in the same sideboard or kept in cloth baskets on the bottom of a closet. Not terribly inspiring when creativity is a key for sewing.

Much of my pleasure reading has been done on Libby or Kindle, but I have purchased a few books here and there, that are waiting patiently in a “to be read” stack. And I have genealogy reference books that need to be put someplace that both allows for easy access and looks aesthetically pleasing.

But where?

The solution was right behind me!

My home office has an open closet behind my desk that has been, for the most part, empty. My wonderful husband recently added eight shelves on the two short sides of this closet allowing me to put all my genealogy binders on one side and my sewing supplies on the other.

My genealogy binders are no longer in alphabetical order. Now they are grouped into family lines based on the immigrants who connected with one another. My Norwegians and my Tånnö Swedes are shelved together. My Uppsala Swedes and my Manx ancestors are on another shelf, and my Swiss and French ancestors are grouped together. This is the way I generally research them, so this system works for me.

While the shelves were being installed, I watched YouTube shows on home office set ups, home office organization, sewing room design, craft room organization, even Feng Shui. I painted the shelves and moved things to their new homes with those shows on in the background. Later I realized how many tips I had picked up along the way! Sometimes I changed direction midstream after I’d seen a better idea on YouTube.

Can form and function go hand in hand in a small room that has to serve many purposes? For weeks now I’ve been working on this room and I believe the answer is yes.

Although I can’t yet say I have ‘everything in its place’, the more often I find homes for my genealogy, sewing and reading-related things, the more I enjoy the time in my home office.

And I’m accomplishing more even though I haven’t yet reduced my outside work hours.