Craft Room Renovation!

Christmas exploded in my craft room this year, as it does every year.  And every year, I clean it up, but everything gets kind of shoved around and is never quite as organized as I would like.  I decided it was time to really get it organized, so I spent some time (way too much time) on Pinterest looking for craft room organization ideas.  Oh my, oh my, oh my!  I wish I had all the money I needed to really make it spectacular, like some of those on Pinterest, but I must say, I'm pretty darned happy with the way it turned out, and I spent less than $100!   

We'll start with the "before" picture -- as I said, Christmas exploded, and who has time to clean up their craft room when they're still doing stuff in there, and working and putting in 60 hour work weeks?  Certainly not I, so no judging, please!  

The first really cool thing I found on Pinterest was to add a sheet of pegboard to the wall.  HEY, we have pegboard from when we had our store!   I really like renovations that don't cost anything!  YAY!  We took a full sheet and cut it down to the size I wanted for my wall.  

I started adding some baskets and stuff to it, as I tried to figure out exactly how I was going to organize things.  I didn't have hooks for the baskets, so I ended up using wire.  Have you any idea how hard it is to feed a wire through a hole that you can't get to from behind?  Yea, it took a while! 

The next thing I added was the cube shelving below the window here.   You know how, when your reorganizing a room or closet, it always gets worse before it gets better?  Well, this is the worse!   Believe it or not, but this is actually progress!  

More mess! 

I did end up buying some hooks for the pegboard, because we didn't have the kind of hooks I wanted.  Along with the hooks, I bought some magnetic strips for holding tools.  I have one of them hanging on the wall next to the pegboard and have some of my tools hanging on it. 

I had a lot of these silk flowers in the closet, but then I would forget what I had, so it's better to have them out in the open and readily available.  

All my spray paint is in the shoe organizer on the back of the door.  I also rolled the ribbon and used stick pins to keep it all from just hanging down willy-nilly.   It looks much neater that way. 

In this picture, I also have new curtains hanging!  These are a really cute red with white polka dots.  I made them for Erica's apartment, and they won't work with her new place, so I cut them down and hemmed them to fit my window!  In between the cubes and the 3 drawer bin is a bag full of deco mesh for making wreaths and stuff.  I used one of those big zippered bags that a bedding set comes in.  Those bags are awesome and I never throw them away!  

Along with all the organization that you can see, what you can't really see is the clear plastic boxes on the white shelves and on the blue three drawer cart next to the wooden file cabinet.  Those are filled with scrapbooking papers and stickers.   I organized all the paper by color (tones) and combined things like Christmas paper with Christmas stickers and placed them in extra large zip lock bags that will fit 13x13 paper that I found on Amazon and then placed them in the plastic boxes that I also found on Amazon.  Now, when I want to scrap a Christmas page, I can just grab that pack from the box and I'm all set!  It took a few hours just to sort through all that, but everything is easy to find now, so it will save time in the future.  

I'm so happy with how my craft room turned out!  I didn't take any pics inside the closet, but that is all cleaned out, too.  All the wrapping paper is organized, and in my OCD state, I even rubber-banded every single role of wrapping paper!  Yea, sometimes, I surprise even myself!  HA!  

Oh, and just because I feel like whining, here is a picture of our neighbor plowing the foot of snow we got on Monday, April 2nd!  APRIL and we got a foot of snow!  A total of 17 inches in three days!  What the heck?!  

Hope all is well with everyone.  In case you're interested, Greg is now three weeks sober.  In between my last post and this one, he ended up having sinus surgery.  I will post about that another day.  Things are going better and I appreciate all the calls, emails, texts and other messages of support and love from everyone!  Let's continue to pray that he is able to stay sober.   

Peace to all! 

Julie