I have been a little quiet on the blog here lately, and I have a good reason.
I have been cleaning my craft room. Duh duh duh.
Yes, it sounds about as fun as it is.
BUT, I am very grateful to have a space for crafting, and I have been making some serious progress.
One of my goals for 2023 was to finally organize my craft room.
I did redo my craft room in 2014 after we moved into our current house. I had never had a craft room before, so I was using an old kitchen table, furniture that didn’t have any other place in the house, and had lots of piles on the floor.
You can see the crazy throwback pictures to my original craft room set-up here (before the IKEA furniture):
https://creativekokes.wordpress.com/2014/04/06/work-space-challenge-part-1/
https://creativekokes.wordpress.com/2014/04/08/work-space-challenge-part-2/
https://creativekokes.wordpress.com/2014/04/29/work-space-challenge-part-3/
https://creativekokes.wordpress.com/2014/05/02/workspace-challenge-part-4/
It’s kind of fun to look back at those posts! Not a creative space, so to be sure I was much happier when we replaced the floor piles and table with nice white IKEA desks, and ALEX drawer units!
But since then, the furnishings and layout haven’t changed that much. And there were still many problems I wanted to fix in order to streamline the room and make it easier (and more fun) to craft.
Here’s some of the things I wanted to change:
1. I am sharing the space with my husband who (since 2020) sometimes works from home and is a paper hoarder. Nothing I can do about that. 🙂 But it does mean that I lost the longest IKEA desk I had to double monitors, a printer, and lots of work supplies. The floor also has boxes filled with his papers. And my most-used supplies were in ALEX drawers from IKEA under that desk, so they were no longer conveniently located in my new work area. Those supplies needed to move closer.
2. I had been using every shape and manner of box, crate, and container to store my supplies as my collection grew. There was also still lots of mismatched furniture that didn’t really fit my supplies. My stuff was stored, but not in an efficient way, and definitely didn’t look nice. Hey, I was using what I had, and that was good enough for me at the time, so that was how it went!
3. All of the kids’ art projects, momentos, gifts to me, etc. had been piling up for years. I hadn’t been keeping everything, but with three kids, well, things piled up FAST.
5. I kept magazine clippings for years. So many pages-most stored in binders in page protectors.
6. When my husband started working from home and set up an office space in the craft room, I moved some of my things into the exercise room next door, and all of that needed to find a home somewhere back in the craft room.
7. My youngest son decided my craft room was HIS craft room and had taken over one whole desk space. There is another desk in the room that I eventually want to be the kid craft desk, but the piles on it? HUGE.
So, that was my starting point.
Whew. What an enormous job.
I feel at this point I need to issue a disclaimer in case some people find the following pictures disturbing.
You have been warned.
Here are some lovely pictures of what the room looked like before I started:
Yep, yikes.
I was planning on working on the room “sometime this year.”
But I got a kick-start to the project when scrapbook.com ran a fantastic deal on these babies:
Only $15 per set of two! And, I had a $50 gift card. Bingo!
So, for the cost of shipping, I picked up six sets (plus a free set of rainbow glitter paper!) and I used every single container.
It took me around four hours (the evening they came of course, because I couldn’t wait), but I cleaned off my desk, cleaned out my window ledge, and using those containers, transformed this:
Into this:
And this:
Into this:
I was even able to snag one leftover organizing piece for some stamps on one of my shelves and got rid of these three containers:
And my Christmas stamps got a new home to themselves in this box for now:
Here is what that shelf looked like before:
And after:
I would like to replace all of the containers, but we’ll get there eventually.
What an improvement!
All of my Project Life cards are together and organized, and are out of all of the various plastic bins and boxes they were in. I still have one box underneath the new organizers, but that box is the super sturdy kind with a magnetic clasp, so I don’t mind keeping that one. Hopefully, down the road I will go through quite a few cards (now that I can see what I have and they are all in one spot), and then the ones in that box can be incorporated in with the others.
My Project Life stamps and embellishments have their own organizer as well, and my marker storage is so much better too-there was even a little leftover space for my adhesive, ink pad, and stamping block!
I also used one organizer to store my most used embellishments (hearts and star stickers) and my stencils (which had been crumpled up in a tiny cubby.) Love it!
I was so inspired by my newly organized space, I made some projects the very next day.
Well, I loved those results so much, I went straight into several more organizing projects, which I will be sharing more about in the coming weeks.
There is a long way to go, but I am going to keep plugging away at it.
The long term goal is to purge unused/unwanted things, organize what’s left, and then get rid of the rest of the mismatched furniture (the book case, yellow desk, plastic shelving systems) and put in an IKEA KALLAX cube system instead to store everything.
I am looking forward to that day very much! 🙂
So, stay tuned-much more of my craft room clean up is coming to the blog soon!
Slow Down, Enjoy, and Create Part 2 