My craft room typically gets destroyed by Christmas preparations. First it’s getting the gifts done, and then it’s getting everything off of the table so that I can wrap all the gifts. And I do mean ALL the gifts. Add in the gifts made for the China colleagues, and the proximity of those projects with the crazy stuff going on at work, and my craft space was devastated.
So, on New Year’s Eve eve, I got to work.
I took some time getting everything off the floor and everything off of the main cabinet because I thought it would be a good idea to figure out how I wanted to reorganize. I’ve known for a while that one of the tall cabinets that was full of scrap book material should be emptied, since I’ve switched to digital there. I’m a stationary fiend, though, so I didn’t really want to get rid of anything. Still, might as well take it out of the storage that could be used for more high traffic items…
So, what you’re seeing is everything up off the floor, and all the stuff off that central cabinet. This isn’t really a true starting off picture, though. No. It was much, much worse. The table was covered, and the trash can in the picture had already been emptied once.
I’m not proud of the state the room was in.
In addition, the organization of the central cabinet itself was questionable. Really, I started throwing things in there when I first got it, with little rhyme or reason, and just a need to get things off of the flat surfaces.
I guess it doesn’t look too bad, but trust me, it would take way longer than it should to find what I was looking for most of the time.
It took most of the day, and a lot of thought, but I’ve reorganized everything. I did have to ask MM for some assistance a couple hours into the afternoon, since I’d hit a wall and didn’t know what I wanted to do about it. He was awesome – came down from relaxing in the man cave, and helped me think things through, including why I was keeping things that I didn’t need. He questioned taking the scrap book materials out of the cabinet and putting them in a bin – I’m just not ready to give it all away, and I did purge what I would either never use or kits that were only fractions of themselves – but otherwise respected the decisions I made.
He took the time to go through a couple of bins that we’d forgotten we had. They both had a bunch of his childhood things that he decided to organize or toss. It was a day of cleanup!
Pictures were taken of things that were family items and sent to family members to see if any of them were wanted. I was honest with myself about how often I would be knitting, and all the yarn was put into a bin as well. Fabric was taken off of the open air shelves and put in the newly available cabinet. Drawers were emptied and reorganized into small containers.
So, here’s the almost finished product:
As you can see, all of my fabric rolls are in the cabinet. They’re not organized in any particular order, and they need to be, but they’re in there. Zippers and fasteners are on the second shelf down (along with fat quarters and felt that I stashed there for the time being), and the third shelf has container of tools that can easily be removed from the cabinet when I’m working on a project. All of my patterns are on the lowest shelf. Previously, those were in the center cabinet, enclosed behind a door.
Now, that part of the center cabinet has the remaining paper tools and such:
As I mentioned, all the drawers were cleaned out and reorganized. I had a bunch of small plastic bins that fit two to a drawer, which ended up working great!
You’ll also notice that the flat portion of the cabinet is mostly cleared off as well. Makes me feel better.
You’re not seeing a picture of the final product, because, to be honest, it’s not done. I have rearranged my DVD cabinet, moving all the full series DVD to the set of shelves behind my table (where the yarn used to be), but the table isn’t quite cleared off yet. I also haven’t dealt with the ironing board, which has my labels and interfacing on it, waiting for me to just bite the bullet and make all the labels for future projects.
All of that being said, I’m really happy with how it turned out. There’s still a little work to be done, but at least when I go down there, I’m not completely overwhelmed with the crazy.
How about you? What did you decide to do to get organized?