Craft Room Organization – Stage 1 – The Starting Point

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Working on a craft room organization is quite the challenge. This organization project is a complete transformation of our craft room because it will include painting the walls, rearranging some of the furniture and storage, acquiring some new furniture and storage, window coverings, a new door for the closet, lighting, and maybe a few more things that we are considering. This is the first stage of my Craft Room Organization.

This is… The Starting Point.

Stages of My Craft Room Organization

I have broken out the craft room organization into the stages I believe will happen. Of course, as we get into the project, these may change. This is where the Project Manager in me takes over.

1. The Starting Point: Assessing Where We Are and Where are We Going (this post that you are reading now)
2. Designing the New Look
3. Preparing to Paint – Repairs, Sanding, Etc.
4. Painting – Walls, Ceiling, Trim, Ceiling Fan
5. DIY Barn Door
6. Furniture and Storage
7. Drop-Leaf Roll-Away Work Table
8. Lighting
9. Window Treatments
10. Fun Details
11. The Big Reveal!

Stage 1 – The Starting Point: Assessing Where We Are and Where are We Going

This is the planning part of the project.

My craft room isn’t too bad. It’s big enough for a craft room and bigger than the craft room in our previous house. It is approximately 13′ x 14′. It’s an eclectic collection of furniture and storage and we still have not gotten around to window coverings since moving in.

The house we moved into has two bedrooms on the main floor that are both master-bedroom-sized. We picked one as the actual master bedroom and the other as “the craft room” because of its southern and western windows. This means lots of natural light throughout the day and into the evening. With both of us having full time jobs, crafts happen on the weekends and in the evenings.

Current Room Layout

The layout of furniture and items in the room was just how it happened when we moved in. You know how it goes when you’re moving in… just get everything into the right rooms and figure it out later. It’s now almost three years after moving in and it’s time to “figure it out” and give this room some attention.

Part of the “starting point” has been to take detailed measurements of the room and the locations of doors, windows, and heating vents. First I drew a floor-plan onto graph paper. I then cut out pieces of paper to the size of furniture that would stay in the room — the two large cabinets with doors.

Then… I discovered IKEA’s room planner! OMG, did you know this even existed?! I redid my whole room layout with the IKEA planner. It’s at the IKEA website under the Planning Tools.

Here is a screenshot of my “clean slate” starting point with the cabinets where they were in the panorama picture at the top of this post.

I  then did a screen capture of the 3-D rotation of the room so you can get a better feel for the start of my craft room organization project.

What’s Coming Next – More Planning

The house we bought was a “flip.” The guy who sold it to us bought it as a foreclosure and flipped it. The entire house has the same cheap off-white flat paint sprayed on the walls. When I did my home office transformation, it took two coats of primer to cover the walls because it was so “thirsty.” I used primer over that paint because the previous residents were smokers. Even with the new paint and carpeting the flipper did, I could still smell it. Every room I paint in this house gets new primer before paint.

Color Scheme

Trying to figure out colors is such a challenge for me. It’s not because I don’t “get” color. It’s because I like so many colors. I go through craft room organization pins on Pinterest and I like so many of them. I can’t have them all. Until I can have color-changing walls to suit my daily mood, I will have to settle on a single color of paint. From the start, I knew I wanted to repaint the ceiling a brighter white. I did that in my home office and was quite pleased with the result. I also knew I wanted my trim to be white. As for the walls, though, that was tough. I did my home office in two shades of green and the nook section a dark blue. It has been over a year since the completion of that project and I am still very happy with those colors.

But, I want my craft room to be different. I have to consider that I will be working on my blog crafts and my regular crafts in this room. Plus, my husband will work on his crafts in here, too. We both need to be happy with the color choice.

This is going to require a lot of paint chip cards.  🙂 I have decided I want something in a blue. It is amazing how many colors exist. After throwing out half of the paint cards, these are my choices:

The whole house is carpeted in the same cheap brown carpeting. As much as I would like to rip out this carpeting, floor covering replacement in this room will have to wait.

The Broken Pocket Door

There is a closet in this room and it is my clothing closet. However, the closet door is a pocket door and it is broken. I had my brother, who has worked in construction for a couple of decades, check it out. To fix the specific problem this pocket door has requires ripping out the wall. Instead, I looked at a barn door style door and just leave the pocket door in its pocket. Then I started to price out barn door kits? They’re so expensive for the wide doors! We came up with a DIY (or DIO – do it ourselves) plan for far less money. I will have a whole blog post just on that door. I am very excited about the plans for this door! Plus, it will have craft organization things ON the door!

Window Treatments

We don’t have any right now. Anything we do will be better than what we have. On the south-facing window I have some paper taped up to the window so I’m not completely blinded by sunlight when sewing. On the two western windows, we tacked up some scrap cloth. It’s just enough to keep the temperature tolerable in that room in the summer, even with the air conditioning and the ceiling fan. We need to come up with something better for this room. We have ideas but nothing solid forming yet.

Storage

As most crafters know, storage for craft supplies is a huge challenge. In this craft room organization, we have to think about the types of crafting supplies we have and what we think we may have in the future. I see craft room organization pins on Pinterest that are very craft-specific. By that I mean people who work mostly with paper need a lot of paper storage so they have a lot of flat storage. Or, there are people who do a lot with ribbon or washi tape and need lots of places for of spools of things. Then there are those who do quilting type crafts and need to store all their fat quarters or quilting yardage… and so on.

I don’t even know how many types of crafts supplies I have. I like (and do) so many crafts. Plus, there are more I want to do. As we looked at storage, we had to consider all of those crafts and how we planned to store them in an organized fashion.

Roll-Away Work Table

There are times when you need a little bigger work space. We came up with an idea to build a roll-away work space that has drop-leaves to provide a large work table when we need it. When not in use, the leaves drop down and out of the way. It can be rolled over to an empty wall then not needed. I will have a whole post on how we build and use that.

Lighting

I need to consider lighting for three reasons.

1. We do most of our crafts in this room. The lighting needs to work for the crafts we do and the space we use to do those crafts.
2. I have this blog. I want the pictures that I share with you to be well-lit so you can easily see how to do something. And, then there are videos. I didn’t realize that video needs some special considerations when it comes to lighting. I have lots of ideas for crafting videos to share with you and I need the lighting to work for those.
3. Everyday use. This is still “my” room for getting ready for work. I am up two-and-a-half hours before my husband. I get up, close the master bedroom door, then get ready for work in my own bathroom and my clothing closet in the craft room. All my clothes are in that closet – across the hall from the master bedroom. To get ready for work, I don’t need the bright white lights that I use for crafting. I think that would be a bit blinding at 5:30 in the morning. I need simple lighting for everyday use.

In my post on lighting, I plan to walk through all our lighting options to accommodate our various needs and how we installed them.

The Fun Details

There will likely be things we do in the room that I call the Fun Details. I can already thing of three of them. They are DIY and hacks that help with the organization of the room, the machines, the supplies, and the tools we use for crafting. I expect to have a separate post for those.

Finally… The Big Reveal!

I will have one last post in the series that walks through the whole craft room organization and transformation that summarizes what we did. I hope you will enjoy watching what we do and find some useful tips for doing your own craft room organization or transformation.

Remember to pin this to your favorite board on Pinterest to help you remember what you can do for your own craft room organization and transformation project.