Making Over the Craft Room

It was time to do a complete overhaul of the entire craft room.  Here's what it looked like before:

Cluttered, crammed full of small furniture, and with a terrible, dark paint job.  We basically moved in, shoved a bunch of crap into this room, and never touched it again.  Bad. 

This little bookshelf wasn't being put to use very well - it was crammed up against the doorway and stuffed full of random crap that belonged in the closet.  

The closet doors were missing, and nothing in the closet (or out of it, truthfully) was very well organized.

First I set about organizing the room.  There were a couple of boxes which should have been stored in the garage that I moved out there;  everything else in the closet got reorganized and re-stacked, so that it would STAY in the closet.  Surfaces were cleared, things were put into plastic bins and stored on an Ikea Hyllis shelving unit in the closet.

Next:

1. I painted the room, in a color I mixed myself by adding some yellow-gold to the SW Silvermist I had on hand leftover from my bedroom. The resulting shade matches up to SW Comfort Gray, if you're interested.  
2. I hung curtains - I moved the white Ikea Matilda semi-sheers from my bedroom into this room, once replacements for the bedroom arrived in the mail (more on that later).  
3. I found the closet doors in the garage, ordered some replacement hardware for them, and re-hung them in the room.  The doors also got a fresh coat of white paint.  
4. I hung the ironing board on the wall behind the entry door, to keep it out of the way
5. I hung a pendant lamp over the sewing table, using an Ikea Hemma light kit and a glass sconce I've had for years.  It and the sewing machines are plugged into a power strip mounted on the side of the desk so that I can turn the entire sewing table on with one button.  
6. I moved a short bookcase from the door of the room over to the corner behind the sewing desk, and moved a small dresser to the door of the room, to hold the printer and printer supplies
7. I hung new art (printed from online) over the bookcase and art table in the rear of the room

Here's the whole room, more or less, in its finished state.  It's lighter and brighter, the windows softer, the furniture balanced and the floorplan open.  I rearranged the furniture and moved that little bookshelf next to the window to balance out the art table on the right side.  I LOVE my new sewing desk, and having doors back on the closet makes a huge difference in how clean and organized the room feels. 

The desk is made from a pair of Ikea Helmer file cabinets, spray painted in "Coastal Sage" (Rustoleum American Accents), with a 2x4' birch project panel across the top - up on 1" shelf risers to make the desk height the correct height.  I've got both sewing machines, the overhead light, and the pencil sharpener and iron plugged into the power strip on the right side of the desk, so I can turn EVERYTHING on at once with the touch of a button.  

Finally, the closet doors.  There's nothing remarkable about them, except that they're finally hung (it took some doing, and I had to buy all new mounting hardware), and they CLOSE and hide all the "organized clutter" inside.  

Tada!   

Bonus: Hall Closet

This is nothing much, but I love my hall closet, and I'm happy to see it each and every time I open the door:

It's teeny:  only 6x2".

Coats on the far right.

A hanging shoe organizer given to me by a friend, into which I've organized my re-usable shopping bags (Austin has a no-plastic policy; this is all we use here).

Hats and purses on S-hooks across the rest of the rod.

Vacuum (and Shark floor steamer, which you can't see in this picture, but which is AWESOME and I highly recommend it if you have tile).

And a bin of larger bags and backpacks on the floor under the shoe bag organizer.

Up top on the shelf is Halloween stuff, and games.

This is one of two closets in the house which both still have the original carpet, wall color, and wire shelving that came with the house.



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IT BEGINS.

Typos are hilarious.  IT BEINGS doesn't have nearly the same ring to it.

So.  Kress is all moved out, and my house is all mine once more.  The move went well, and we said tearful but happy goodbyes to each other and to each other's pets, hehe.  It all ends on a happy note, for both of us.  On to bigger and brighter things!

And then I began the complete reorganization of my entire house, which will end up taking me all summer.  I started by cleaning.  Hoo boy, moving raises SO much dust!  I was on my feet all day and evening both Saturday and Sunday, and I have a LOT to show you.  But we'll start where I started, after the place was clean:  with the closets in the master bedroom.

My closet has always been the one in the bathroom, on the bottom of the picture.  You saw the makeover for that one back in  December.  The other closet, up on the left, was Kress' closet.  I spent the whole weekend cleaning both, and re-distributing items and furniture.



In my closet...

While I loved the shoe shelves, back in December I got in a little over my head - literally.  I could barely reach the towels on the top shelf, and have been dumping them on my head for months, and I was TIRED OF IT.

So I removed the shelving and installed it lower, so that the tall boots are on the ground, and the tallest shelf (now housing stuffed dinosaurs, manatees, and alligators with big floppy aardvark ears), is about forehead level.

I also moved my dresser out into the bedroom, to take the place of some large bookcases that moved out of the room.  The two plastic bins on these shelves are for my unmentionables.  I like having them in the closet, but not in the dresser.

Since the dresser was gone, I got a set of two café curtain rods from the dollar store (for all of $1.29, seriously), and used them to hang my collection of scarves.

They're within easy reach, not taking up hanger-space on the clothing bar, and I really like the way they look hanging like this.

With the dresser out, and the shoe shelf lowered, the closet feels a ton more open.










The other closet...

...is now both my linen closet and my SCA closet!  About 10/90%, too - you can see the towels there.  Everything else in the closet is SCA:  long, heavy dresses, shoes, underlayers, and drawers and baskets full of hats, sleeves, scarves, snoods, and all sorts of other accessories.

There's still some renovation to be done in here:  there's carpeting on the floor that's original to the house.  It's in good shape, but it and another closet elsewhere in the house are the only pieces of carpet left.  And, believe it or not, the walls in here have never been painted. Also, you know how I detest that wire shelving.  So, updates on all that forthcoming.

Meanwhile, ALL THIS was in my other closet!  And the dresser was in there! That's too much stuff!  So this helps a lot.








Later this week I'll show you what I did with the dresser in the bedroom, as well as some work going on in the living room, some furniture painting, and some furniture building!  WHEW.


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My New Closet. Let Me Show U It.

First, though, I have to show you the freaking HORROR that was my closet only three days ago.  I was fed up with the lack of space, lack of organization, maddening disarray, shitty old furniture, and less than adequate hanging space.  Fed UP.  And yet, even three days later, looking back at the before pictures, I'm SHOCKED - how was I living like that?  Good lord!  UGH.

Here's the floorplan we were working with before, which is neat and cute.


But here's what it actually looked like:

AUGH!!!

• 4 shelves
• stack of 10yo Cube-Its by Sauder
• stacks of plastic storage bins
• piles of clothes everywhere that either don't fit anywhere, or won't stay anywhere.  

AUGH!!!

• in case you can't tell, that thing in the middle in both pictures is a small bookshelf filled with baskets and boxes of crap (and dinosaurs)
• whole top shelf:  none of that stuff is even mine. It's just in here. 
• you'll see in a minute how utterly ridiculous that clothing bar on the far right is.

But what's in the center?  I'm glad you asked...

Seriously.   

Believe it or not, this constitutes my shoes being "put away."  At least, the ones that don't fit on the shelf in the hall by the front door, that is.  I *only* have like thirty-some pair.  And nowhere to keep them.  >_<

Even the cats are like...wtf...

Help me, Olioboard!

LOL.


Drumroll, please...

It looks so clean and pretty when it's empty, doesn't it?


I do adore this color, but in this tiny space, I really needed it gone so I could see my actual clothes.  Especially since the lighting in here leaves much to be desired (it's a lightbulb. Seriously. That's it. Just a lightbulb).

Wire. Shelving.  *HISS*

That thing sticking out of the wall for seemingly no reason is a curtain rod bracket I put up to hold my belts.  It's basically the only thing in this closet that actually worked.

I must've patched five. million. holes in this closet before I started to repaint.

Goodbye, old closet! Goodbye, five million holes!  Goodbye, beautiful blue that was still too dark! Goodbye, clean floor (no dropcloth. Oops).  Goodbye, Laura's back, and knees, and shoulders!

After  

Look how clean and fresh!  This is Behr's "White Clay", the same color I put on the ceilings in the bedroom and dining room.  This time, though, it's in a Valspar prime-and-paint, satin-finish base - Lowe's doesn't carry Behr, but they matched the color for me.

Those same four shelves are back up on the left side, in a slightly different configuration; and I've added a fifth.  Why is it so far below the others? Just you wait.

No! More! Wire! Shelving!   Instead I now have one loooooong clothing bar stretching from left to right, for more than double the hanging space than I had before.

Center stage is Ikea's STOLMEN post - meant to be used vertically and in pairs to support other organizing components.  It took a little bit of hacking to get it to hang securely horizontally (and in the process I discovered the purpose of the little inset-corner on the left side: it's a pipe chase.  Which meant that it took a bit more hacking to get that end of the STOLMEN post secured to the wall without putting any screws into my plumbing!)

It's a bit higher than the old clothing bar was, to accomodate my loooong SCA costumes and gowns.

 
Ta-da!  

Omg, that is soooo much better.  Look, I have shoe storage!  And space on that bottom shelf for boots (none of which are standing up right now, because I don't have inserts for them yet, lol).

Those old Cube-Its now have a home underneath the shelving, out of the way.

And all those clothes now have a nice, comfy space to live...

...I'm not even kidding, all of these clothes were crammed into the right half of the closet on the clothing bar under that wire shelf that I took down.  THAT WAS NOT ENOUGH ROOM.  It was literally less than half the length of this new bar.


I do still have some plastic storage bins in here, but now they fit neatly underneath one end of the hanging clothes, out of the way, and mostly out of sight.



Hey, what's that over there?

It's the dresser I refinished over the weekend!  :D

This replaces that stupid bookshelf-and-baskets situation that wasn't working before.  Notice the lack of clothes piled on top!  :D

I haven't really finished decorating the top of it yet; for now there's a tray meant to keep small items from sliding off the top (a problem I had before on the very rare occasion that there weren't clothes piled on top of the bookshelf).

The artwork is a very faded copy of a Matt Manley print I cut from a calendar a million years ago, that used to hang in my bathroom before I put the gold-framed mirror in there.

Winchester says hi. 

I did, however, put my newly-repainted Ikea FIRA jewelry chest in here, which was the plan all along.



Whew!   All of this happened in one day.  Including like 90% of the work on the dresser.  I'm pretty sore.








There's another four-day weekend coming up.  I think I'll sleep through this one.


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Impending Closet Makeover

Next on the list of Thing I Keep Meaning To Do But Haven't Yet is, apparently, my bedroom closet.   You guys have seen it...

Exhibit A: nasty shelf, piles of crap (and dinosaurs)

Exhibit B:  tiny practically worthless dresser (that is now a
nightstand anyway) and not much room for hangity clothes,
on the right side there. 

Those are both photos of the long (east) wall of my closet.  Here's the floorplan:

(Icovia Room Planner)

It's the same blue as my bathroom and bedroom, which I thought would be soothing and contiguous, but instead is just too cotton-candy cute for my level of concentration first thing in the morning when I'm trying to figure out what to wear without getting pissed off.

On the left (north) are some shelves, floor-to-ceiling, white MDF.  On the long wall are crappy, picture-of-wood stackable Cube-It cubbies and rickety shelves holding neat, organized baskets piles of crap (and dinosaurs). On the right is the clothing rod, attached to a wire shelf which supports more piles of crap.   There isn't enough room for ANYTHING.  I don't even have my shoes in there - most of them are on a shelf in the living room hallway.  Basically it looks kinda like this:

Blehhhhh.   (Olioboard)

Enter:

Ikea STOLMEN post, $30, mounting
hardware included, ivory finish.   (Picture
from Pinterest via Ikea 2011 catalog)

Dresser from Target:  $40 on craigslist

The idea:  

I love Olioboard. 

Brighter, less light-sucking and color-confusing walls!  A dresser to keep things in and put things on!  The main idea here, though, is that STOLMEN post across the long back wall, for my hanging clothes:  I can hang everything that's folded neatly piled on and stuffed into the shelves, which frees up space on the left side for shoes and linens, and space on the right side for that dresser (and some dinosaurs).  Yay!

Just kidding about the rug.  And the chandelier.  Maybe.

more room to throw shit on the floor move around, too. 

The question, Raymond:

Will I actually get around to doing this any time soon?

The world may never know. 

Hooked on Using Unused Space

This one's fairly simple:

This is the empty corner of the master bathroom before.  It's empty, unused wall space that kinda always irritated me, because if it was recessed even just a little, I could have put some small, cute bathroom furniture here.  But nooooo.  Empty wall space.  Right there between the room entry and my closet, and directly across from the toilet cave.

Meanwhile, (a) there's not nearly enough towel storage in this bathroom. The house came with a rinky-dink little towel rack that was IN the toilet cave (because that's useful), which I promptly removed and replaced with a double-hook on the wall-end next to the shower, which is much more useful.  

And (b) everybody's bathrobes ended up in my closet, which, no.

And so... 

Here's that same wall between the doors, after having installed a simple 1/2x4" board (very securely, with wall anchors, and caulked in place, just to be sure), and three silver hooks I had sitting around in the garage.

Now that empty wall has a function and we have a space for our bathrooms and extra towels.  Let's hear it for less crap in my poor cramped closet!


♥ ¸. • * ¨ `* •.♫. • °☆ * ♥ confetti and stuff ♥ •*• * ¨ `*~♫♪☼ ¸.☆























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When Closets Attack!

I believe I've mentioned before that my bedroom closet is a great big hot mess.  The dream is something along these lines...

wouldn't this be nice? 

And to be fair, while the reality is something slightly less organized, I am getting there, albeit slowly.  My closet doesn't affect anyone but me, so I'm allowing bits and pieces of it to come to me whenever it does, and spending my focus right now on the guest bath and guest bedroom.

A couple of weeks ago, though, I paid a visit to the small north Texas town of Burkburnett, and while I was there, I stopped at an indoor city-wide garage sale type of event to poke around.  It was cute in that Tiny-Texas-Town kind of way, there were lots of really nice people, and even live music in the center of the auditorium, which was nifty.  And I found a pair of cute little mirrors - about 15x18" - for $8 for the pair!

 I had them sitting on my kitchen counter for two weeks before I figured out what to do with them - well, with one of them anyway.  Into the bedroom closet they went!

Ooh, ahh. 

 It was...okay.  I actually cleaned up this portion of my closet quite a bit - removed some storage bins I wasn't using that I'd set on top of the dresser and then ignored, for example (remember that dresser?)  I also put the dresser up on bed riser feet so I can get to my socks without throwing my back out (it's a little small, but it'll do until I find the perfect one for this space ).

But it wasn't...quite...

THERE!  

A nicer, newer basket for my hair things and scarves, and some gold paint for that mirror.  I painted it on, then wiped the edges down to "weather" it a bit.

~*sparkle*~

 Now to
(a)  figure out what to do with the other mirror like this, and to
(b)  do something about the rest of the closet...

º~º

Pseudo-Update

Wow, I'm doing a great job updating this week, aren't I?  

I'm really doing the stuff I said I was gonna do, too.  I just keep forgetting to take pictures!  So far this week, I have:

1. Planted a rose bush in the front garden, and cleaned up the area around it in preparation for some changes I plan to make next week
2. Planted a bush in the backyard (and scolded a dog who tried to dig it up, even though I'd put fencing around it, then put the sprinkler next to it to keep him away, because he's terrified of the sprinkler).
3. Put up some of the shelves in the craft room, and began organizing my fabric onto it, in order to (a) start getting the floor cleared of giant plastic bins, and (b) free up a couple of the bins so I can pack camping stuff into them
4. Taken a gigantic truckload of clothes and items to Goodwill, after having mercilessly purged my wardrobe recently to make space for (a) clothes that actually fit me and (b) costumes! 

Speaking of costumes...

I started that costume blog that I was telling you about the other day. Good news on two fronts:  YOU don't have to be bothered reading my costume stuff if you're only here for the plants and houses; and *I* have a shiny new toy.  Hee!  If you're interested, my costume blog is here:

http://clothofstars.blogspot.com

 


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For My Closet...FML

Ugh.  My closet.

Remember this, from September?   Yeah, me either.

Actually, I did get rid of the step-shelf.  And I moved the heavy wood shelf in, on the main wall (under the mirror, which only exists in the sketch).  I stuffed it with baskets; but the baskets I had were WAY wrong for the shelf - wrong size, wrong style, wrong color, just...WRONG.  And a pain in the butt to use, too. 

However, since my last aquarium went belly-up and I no longer needed the little mini-dresser I had refinished to go under it, the mini-dresser got moved into the closet instead:

It works great - in the space, and as...wait for it...a dresser.  Imagine that.   It's a bit short, but I've got an idea for a little hutch-type thing to place on top of it (if I can find it in the garage).

My clothes are actually pretty well contained within the arrangement of shelves and rods I have now (especially since earlier this month I got rid of like half of them, finally).  The sketch above called for a small bar to the left of the dresser/mirror area for long coats and dresses, and a secondary dresser-type storage unit on the left below the shelves made of these modular cubes I have sitting around. But since linen-closet items are actually the biggest problem at the moment, I'm thinking of stacking the cubes vertically in the same space for more of a linen-cabinet type of thing for towels, sheets, rugs, etc. 

a similar tower o' cubes in my living room

If that ends up working, then the only thing missing will be the shelf running around the top of the room, and the mirror over the dresser.  Here's hoping!





(And I may or may not get around to this.  I've spent all week getting ready for a party tomorrow night, so that'll take up my entire day tomorrow; but usually Sunday after a party I like to unwind by doing something like this that just for me.  So we'll see). 

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♫ Toniiiight, Toniiiiight...♪♪

Plans! Yay!  This is me trying to get psyched about the next thing I need to do in my sewing room!  It's totally not working!

You know what is working? My bedroom closet...which is completely NOT working, which is why I'm excited about the sewing room.  Confused yet?  Me, too.  There are two bookshelves in my sewing room which are crammed full of crap, and there are two newly-updated/painted shelves in the garage that need to be moved into the sewing room, and there's a stair-step-shelf in my closet which doesn't remotely work for my storage needs in there and needs to go live in the garage where I can use all the storage I can get, no matter what it looks like.  (And we're up to four rooms now, if you're counting).

The next step in the sewing room - and if I can just get past this one (going on two weeks now!) I'll be OVER it and can move on to the fun part - is to unload all the crap from the shelves in there, and replace them with the newly painted shelves. 

And then I can move one of the old shelves from the sewing room into my bedroom closet, which is the part I'm excited about.  Because, at the moment, my bedroom closet looks like this:

wikimedia commons

When what I want is for it to look like this:

arhzine.com

Just kidding.  (That's cool, though, isn't it?  Just a little bit goth-y. I like it). 

My master bedroom, bath, and closet are all done in the same color scheme and style (more or less, I've been tweaking recently)...but the closet "organization" is just awful.

Here's a mini-before (top left), along with the basic floor plan (lower left) and planned "after."    The shelf with the baskets on it is the one from the sewing room (which I originally built to hold shoes in the entryway, and which has also served time in the dining room as a junk magnet buffet).

Which brings us back to the sewing room, because that's where this shelf is right now, holding up some dangerously unstable cardboard boxes full of crap.  Yay, crap!

I tell you, if there was EVER motivation to go home and clean up my junk, it's this blog right here (which I'm enjoying thoroughly, but, YEESH).  Tonight: shelves!  Tomorrow: the world.


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