Boxes, boxes, boxes everywhere!

We are in the process of packing up our house in order to move to a new house in early March 2026 and put our existing house on the market.

So far I’ve packed 75+ small boxes (the image above is only a small sampling) while John works on various house projects to put the house on the market.

In a December 2025 post (Chaos in the Craft Room!) I mentioned that John and I were looking at downsizing and selling our house someday. At the time I wrote that, “someday” meant in early to mid 2027. We didn’t have any plans to move in 2026!

So how did we get here?

Well a month ago, on a lovely day in late January 2026 (we’ve had a bout of unseasonably nice weather in the lower elevations in Colorado…we live at 6000 feet above sea level which is a lower elevation in this high altitude state) John and I decided to go explore neighborhoods north of us.

We absolutely fell in love with a new-ish community near the Denver Airport (but not on the flight path, ha!) and found a perfect ranch-style house (one level living but this ranch house also had a loft where I could have my studio and a 70% finished basement) and made a major life decision to move now instead of next year!

You never know how much stuff you have until you try to pack it…

So John and I put an offer on the new house, which was accepted, and began packing up our lives. We’ve also been purging a lot from our lives. This has been kind of freeing and kind of frustrating as we wished we hadn’t bought the stuff in the first place. Oh well, the charity thrift shops will have some nice things to sell.

I didn’t purge more fabric as I’ve already had a couple purges over the years, but I did purge more craft books (I guess I’m never going to get into macrame or making paper flowers, ha!)

Here is what my studio, that I just moved in December to a smaller room, currently looks like:

It’s been an exhausting whirlwind of major life change but we are trying to focus on the excitement of moving to our new “forever home” and that John will have a new woodworking workshop in the garage and I will have a cozy studio in the loft.

Plus it is a new construction home (it is a former model home) and we will be the first people to live in it!

Here is a follow up to the Guest Blogger’s post 01/08/2020 from Guest Blogger: What the heck is going on here? .

The tierneycreates Beastie stated: “…she has set up this basket of hand craft projects in the living room and allegedly she will show you what is inside of this basket in her next post”. So I am now obligated to do just that, otherwise my Beastie will give me grief about it!

A Peek Inside the Basket of Hand Crafting

So we are staging the house for sale and had to pack up my studio and my sewing machine.

I am not sure how long it will take to sell the house, and find another house, and then to move into that new house. It could be several months and I cannot go that long without crafting, so I set up a basket in the living room of crafts I can do by hand.

I am also in the process of setting up a sewing basket, found at a thrift shop, with my commonly used tools for hand crafting.

Here’s what is inside the basket – a lot of old hand work projects, and some new ones, that I would like to finish.

English Paper Piecing (EPP)

Ssee my series of post Adventures in Paper Piecing for some background on this project. I made the zipped bag I am storing the project in.

In addition to the EPP project above, I also have this EPP project which I have not started (and do not know what I am doing with these hexies which I made from a friend’s scraps during a quilt retreat several years ago:

The Yo-Yo Project

Someday I might blog about this old mysterious project…

Sashiko

Another project(s) I should blog about someday…if I get any further on my dabble with Sashiko stitching.

It was an impulse buy (twice) at at a quilt shop…

Knitting

A hat in progress and a ribbed (or seed stitch scarf) to go with the hat I made a friend that I discussed in this post – The Ball of Yarn (which eventually became a hat).

The hat in progress has a story behind it that I will share in a future post.

Miscellaneous Projects

If I ever get working on them, I will explain what they are in a future post (smile).

So that’s what is in the basket! I think I have enough projects to keep my busy a couple months.

Postscript

I am writing this post from the airport as I am returning from a small informal quilt retreat with 3 quilting friends. At this retreat I brought my EPP and made some progress! And I did some freeform log cabin block piecing with a borrowed sewing machine and a bag of a friend’s scraps. More of my next post.