Craft Room Organization... Still In Progress

So to start off, we bought a house in January that was a foreclosed, totally out-of-date home and we worked every single day (on top of school, work and the girls) to make it up-to-date and close to what we would like for it to look like (mostly). Well it has plain colors and lots of wood, we are kind of sick of looking at it everyday. Tan or very light gray (almost white) walls, dark and light woods and tan carpet. We are artistic, creative and colorful people (for peat's sake, my hair is blonde with blue and pink streaks in it!) so we are adding LOTS of color to the house.... Ok so now I'm off topic but I will get back to the color part in a later post!

One of the challenges of having a home and being busy is making and keeping things organized! We had a hard time trying to organize when we first moved in because we had the girls' birthday party the weekend after we moved in, Ryan had been forced to take on the task of three people at work (while getting paid the exact same amount... talk about a stressful 6 months!) and I was working on school work... So over the summer I have been working in-between homework for me and taking the girls everywhere, to start to organize our house before we start painting and reconstructing... So far I have done three rooms :-)

The first room I will talk about and discuss my method for organization. Pre-warning: this room is not all the way complete but it is WAYYYY better than it was before and we can find things. It got a little worse because we started the girls doing homeschooling so some of the boxes from that are in there, not put away and also we just got a new TV for our bedroom that is being housed in there until we can organize our bedroom (which is a feat we have never finished since we've lived together... the bedroom to us comes last on the list of organizing/unpacking. Ok, so here it goes (complete with pictures, please don't judge me!)

So when we moved in, we chose this lovely bedroom on the front of the house to be our craft room because we have A LOT of craft stuff so we thought it would only be right to dedicate a whole room to it! It has a large window in the room that faces the street and gets lots of light so we can save electricity when we are in there a lot completing various project. I can also watch the girls playing outside with their friends while I am working on various crafts... It was perfect! So I labeled our boxes for that room and the movers put the boxes there. They sat there and I moved through boxes and just grabbed what I needed from the boxes and left it at that. Well I finally got fed up with it and worked for a whole day to get it done... Well it goes mostly done LOL and I didn't even spend more than $10 on the whole organization process!

Here are a few before pictures that were taken before I started to work on the room.

My first task was the closet. There were scraps of carpet from when we had the carpet installed, our cake tower that we built for our wedding in pieces, bags full of Christmas stuff (mainly wrappers and ornament boxes that were garbage), some of my quilting and bookbinding materials, my sewing machine box, a tattered box that I've had since I was in high school with my various fabric and scraps and accessories and a few things that don't even belong in the craft room! I forgot to take a before picture, trust me, it's for the better! But here is the after picture, it makes me happy :-)

Yup, that's it, that is how much it has been reduced to! The lovely hard blue box you see has my fabric in it, I have my quilting/bookbinding materials in that recycled paper box and the blue/tan polka dot container has my "adult" crafting stuff that the girls need to ask before they can use... Things like paint, glitter, stronger glues than Elmer's, etc. This closet cost me $1 to organize.... The materials I already had and the blue box was a gift from a wonderful woman named Martha when we were moving, the $1 was for the blue/tan organizing box from the Dollar Tree.

Next, we'll talk about the girls' corner of the room. If any of you have kids, you'll know that they can't seem to keep anything organized or put things in their place (especially if they don't know where it should go). This was true for this corner. They just kind of threw things over there, never putting them where they should kind of be, always losing things and breaking them because they would step on something they just tossed into that corner. On the left is the before and on the right is the after. It's is soooo different AND they have kept it this way since I have done it!


















On the left you see the before. Atrocious, I know! On the right is the after picture... MUCH better!! The girls can now see where everything is before they remove it and know where to put everything back when they are done with it!


Now I will show you my little paper organizer that I have changed a little to make it my scrapbook corner. My sister put this stuff away before but I don't blame her at all for it not being organized or where/how I want it. She was helping and did a great job at helping me unpack before the girls' birthday party! You'll have to look at all of the before/working pictures to see how this thing looked before!

As you can see it looks wayyyy better than it did before! I will be adding some more to it because I have a few boxes with scrapbooks (both finished and still working on them) as well as pictures and fun little things for scrapbooking but it will be put away in an organized manner!


Ok and here is where it is now. It still needs some work but I couldn't stay up any longer to work on it... I was already up until 4am working on this room haha I will be finishing it soon though, it NEEDS to get done!

As you can see, it is not all the way done BUT it is much better than what it was :-)

Some of the organization bags/boxes and white wood units are things I already had. The only thing I needed to buy were the blue/tan polka dot boxes. They come in many shapes and sizes and are found at Dollar Tree for $1 each.... Which is a STEAL for these containers. They are just as strong as any other fabric box you would buy from Target, Walmart, etc. but they cost way less! I love that they have a removable hard bottom piece to add stability. I used one of the hard bottoms in a wider box to separate our glue from our rulers using binder clips and the bottom being folded in half. All in all I spent a maximum of $10 on this room, which is great for me because I dislike spending money on things if I don't have to!

I would highly recommend browsing your local dollar store (not a dollar general or family dollar though, they have various prices on their items so everything isn't a dollar but they might have some good deals on stuff too) and find containers you like to organize with... Most of the time they have different colors, materials and are actually good quality.

I will be purchasing a pegboard from Lowe's, some zipties and some cute colored plastic cups from the Dollar Tree next month and installing it in the craft room to add some extra organization in that room for the little things. I will post some pictures of that when it happens.

Happy Organization and Crafting Ladies and Gents :-)