Plans, plans everywhere!

 Call me crazy, but the last few weeks I've been really excited about planning to redecorate my room after I graduate and return home. 

I want to redesign my room into a compact studio, where I can work on my art while I live and work in Shetland for a year. At the moment, my grand plan is to graduate- return home, work and save money for a year, having a general 'year out'. In this time I can work on all my waiting projects, such as Ozzy the Otter and other children's book ideas I have floating around in my head. 

 At the moment I hate my room. I designed it when I was 10 years old and it hasn't changed since. Currently it is purple and pink and I can't bear to be in there.
I desperately want a big corner desk where I can spread out my stuff and work on my illustrations. There isn't much space, but but I'm hoping to make the desk, custom to fit to the room's measurements. Come mid June, my first task will be gutting my room of everything in it, dumping a huge amount of stuff and starting from scratch. This image below was made through http://www.urbanbarn.com/Room-Planner . It allows you to insert the measurements of your room, from there you can experiment adding furniture.

I'm sure I'll blog about it nearer the time. I've secretly been really interested in interior design for years and years. All that's left to do is save up the cash needed to buy the furniture, paint and accessories I need to make this a reality. 

This is how I plan my room to be, accurate to scale. 

All this planning has been keeping me sane between writing my dissertation.

At home, not only am I planning to redecorate my room, but I am also planning to help re-do our back garden. My mam and I are busy scheming to redesign the garden entirely. It used to be a rockery, but it has long since overgrown and the space is completely redundant and neglected. Not the prettiest it could be.

(copyright bing maps via FlashEarth.com)

The area is utterly blasted by the north wind coming straight off the arctic. The voe seems to act like a wind tunnel that funnels the wind straight into us. It isn't exactly an ideal place to grow plants. 

This is our house and back garden as it currently is. In sketching this up I drew over a satalite image to get the measurements as there are no plans of our house including the garden. The grey areas are all the places which need renovated.

As it is, the back garden isn't used. It's a wasted space, sandblasted by the storms and salt spray coming off the voe. The area consists of a slope downwards from the house itself, towards the back right corner where there is a little gate leading to the outside. 

I don't have any exact photos of the garden just now, but below are the closest I could find on my hard drive. 

On summer nights, the view is beautiful. We often have barbeques outside- midges and weather depending.

After many lengthy discussions on facebook and skype with my mam, sharing ideas on pinterest and google images, I came up with this:

The finished area from above

My mam's grand plan is to make an outside feature stone fireplace surrounded by a (hopefully) windproof cottage garden.

The above two were sketched hastily on skype via 'screen share' talking things through with my parents. A decking area, matching the already existing decking at the front of the house, with steps leading down into a paved patio with a big fireplace at its center.  

Though I haven't drawn it in very well, around the fireplace is a stone bench where people can sit. We could make cushions to fit it, which would be taken out in the summer. Having barbeques whilst being warmed by the big fireplace looking out the voe in the Simmer Dim sounds pretty good to me.

The biggest problem is the whole area needs to be dug down and flattened out by a digger. The lower we can get the landscaping, the better. We need all the shelter we can get from the prevailing wind. The problem is getting the digger in there in the first place. Our house is built on the side of a hill. From the way our house was built, there is no room for a digger to scoot around either side of our house. To get a digger in, we may have to get a crane and lift it high up over the wall or better yet, we may have to remove fences and walls to get it in :P. Regardless its just too big a job to do by hand.

All very exciting, I can't wait to get home to get started. Though no doubt, I'll be sad when my university life is finally over, I'll be so glad to get back to normality :D At least I'll have plenty to keep myself occupied!