I am in love with my space!! It was a lot of work but so worth it. You can see how my room was set up before HERE. The layout of the room is still the same but I organized the closet and re-organized what was in my cubes and bookshelf. I would love for you to come along on the tour with me. Hopefully you can uses some of my ideas to help organized your crafting space. Let's start with my closet storage.
I took everything out of it (which is why my previous post looked like this) and sorted all the items into 3 piles. Keep, donate/trash, or move to storage. I am trying to only keep scrapbook/DIY/school items in my room, so only those items were allowed in the keep pile. I also knew I was not using my space in my closet effectively. Since this is not a closet that will be holding clothes I have the ability to go vertical in my storage. A quick trip to Target and I picked up this 20.00 bookcase. I added some cute paper to the back to make it pop! Meijer had these pink bins on sale and I had no problem finding supplies to put in them. I then added my favorite Martha Stewart chalkboard labels, and wrote what was in the bins with my Bistro Chalk Marker. I added some colorful paper and washi tape to my magazine files to give
them a fresh look. The polka dot box (also wrapped in new paper) is my
mist/glitter/glue spray box - the inside is not as pretty as the out!
The cheveron bin (also a sale find at Meijer) holds all my vinyl and
shelf paper.
I have a love/hate relationship with wire shelving. I hate when things
fall through the wire or sit funny. My only shelf in my closet right now
is a wire one. To avoid this I took some foam board and some pretty
shelf liner to lay on the wire rack. I choose to put the foam board face
down because who is really going to see that pretty shelf liner if it
is under all my items??? I keep items that I use every so often up top
like my sewing machine (I have never used it but I swear I am going to
learn how to sew!), spray paints, photo albums, office supplies, and
miscellaneous scrapbooking tools.
The biggest change I made was what lives in my big expedit. I thought about the last few times I worked at my desk what I used. I made a list, and then began moving those items into the expedit. I now have scrapbooking items that I use the most at my finger tips.
I of course had to label everything to satisfy my labeling obsession!
Also in the lower cubes I have office supplies/tools that I use all the
time, my planners/binders and files. This is a combo room and I do homework, planning, blogging, and
more in this room.
In my bookcase I decided to only house my scrapbook albums that I am currently working on or know of pages that need to be added to them. My stickers still live in the zip up binders and my cricket cartridges fit perfect in my narrow shelf. I added my 8.5 x 11 cardstock papers as I use those a ton and need those with in reach.
All my electrical cords live in the little drawer, and the big drawer is an open space to add items that need a space after living in this space awhile. The bottom shelf holds mostly my patterned paper in the carry cases.
The patterned paper was another disaster that you could see. I really needed to organize this as well. So here is what it looks like now! I love it.
I sorted out my papers by what the papers were - stripes, polka dot, holiday, etc. Again using my favorite way to label -Washi tape and my label maker - I labeled inserts. I then cut a label on my Silhouette and laminated it to create a label of what was in the box, and stuck it on the outside of the box. I laminated the label first because I like change. In 6 months I might not like having my patterned paper in these boxes, or I might accumulate more paper and need to shift paper around. With the label laminated I can just remove the label tape and make a new label to stick on there!
Another big change was this baby in the corner.
There was no organization to these drawers. I had all kinds of stuff in
each drawer and most of it were things I hadn't used in years. I am a
firm believer in using up my scraps! So after every project I sort my
solid scraps by color, and I used to keep them in a 12 x12 box (like the
ones that hold my pattern paper). This worked for awhile but due to the
various sizes of the paper it was becoming a mess. I decided to give
each color it's own drawer. So now all my color scraps live here! The
top drawer is my pattern scraps drawer for now. I am starting to get
quite a few scraps so I might have to come up with a new place for these
soon.
Across the room my 12 x 12 solid paper still live in these drawers, organized by the rainbow!
I still use my Cricut, so this guy lives on top of my smaller expedit. Below are in the cubes are items that I use but not daily, and items that I don't need at my fingertips. It houses a lot of my binders, school stuff, and photo boxes.
This is where the tour ends. I hope you enjoyed your tour and maybe even picked up and idea that you can use. I would love to hear any of your ideas that you have used in your scrap room/craft room. Leave me a comment below!
