My Beautiful Craft Closet

Throughout my life I have been a collector of stuff.  I look at something and think “you never know when this might come in handy!” Since I am a teacher without a classroom to call my own, I need to stay flexible with the resources that I own.  This translates into an enormous amount of teaching supplies that inhabit my house, and still, three years later, my parents’ basement (thank you, Mom and Dad).  Until recently these supplies were also taking up critical space in my office closet.  One day I realized that the most efficient way to use this room was to organize it so that it only housed things that I needed for my office, or my hobbies.  I wanted a space that I could enjoy, where everything had a home.  Now, with the exception of my huge children’s book collection, this is exactly what you will find in my office/craft room.

To give you some perspective, here is what my office looked like when we first viewed our house.  Yuck!

After about a year of living here, my lovely husband offered to paint my office. I chose Behr’s Azure Blue because it was such a happy, vibrant colour that would pair well with black and white accents.

Over the next two years the space evolved with the addition of scrapbook storage cubes, grown-up office furniture and a pretty rug.

Despite my best efforts, the closet continued to be a dumping ground for things that did not need to be there, while many things that should have been inside the closet ended up in piles around our house.

One day over the Christmas holidays I reached my breaking point.  Everything came out of the closet, and a new craft closet was born!

I wasn’t thinking about blogging when I took on this project so here is my almost starting point:

First, my husband cut two new deeper shelves to replace the previous hanging rod and narrow shelf. Then, using a variety of storage boxes and baskets, my lovely blue drawers (with a piece of foam core cut to act as a shelf on top) and a shoe organizer from Lowe’s, my closet transformed into this:

Now, my office closet matches the functional beauty of the rest of my office.

More on that another day . . .

Thanks for visiting!

 

 

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