Craft Room Re-do: Before

It will probably be on the quiet side around here for a bit. For several months now, mom and I have been slowly getting the ducks in a row to completely re-do our shared craft room, and the time has finally arrived to start making it happen. Because of this, I won't be set-up even remotely to work on much of anything (except maybe a few more hats for the Royal Knitwits), and my computer will be tucked away in my bedroom and only really be turned on for work-related tasks.

I have no real idea how long this will all take, but I'm pretty excited about what a remodeled and totally re-organized craft room will mean for our productivity. And to give you an idea of why this really needed to happen, here are some before photos when it was at its worst last year:

 

I have to cringe. Really. There's a queen-sized mattress right there in the middle of the room. We had to put it there since there was nowhere else to store it at the time, and immediately it got piled up with all manner of things. Works in progress, fabric purchases, stuff we had gotten to help with organization (oh, the irony), and even things that my husband needed to get away from the kids. We try to make a concerted effort to keep things under control in all the other areas of the house (admittedly, we often fail), so this sort of became the one room we stopped caring about.

Eventually, we did get that mattress out, but it was already too late. Over time, we found ourselves working in there less (and therefore working on our projects less), and getting so frustrated by our lack of order that we often stopped even trying to start new things. As two people with a lot of creative energy, this was a major problem.

There's one window in the room that faces the west, so it gets really good sunlight in the afternoons. This is where the cutting table resides. My grandpa made it ages ago for my grandma, and it passed onto my mom, so it's a heirloom piece. It really wasn't getting the respect it deserves.

In the corner, there used to be a closet, which was pretty much a catch-all, but was also where my garb was theoretically supposed to go. (You can see my wedding dress there too.) Ultimately, in the grand scheme of our house, the closet would eventually become a part of the hall bath, and since we really needed an intact corner more than we needed a closet in this room, we went ahead and closed it off. Here's what that looks like at the moment:

I loved the papel picado banner mom had picked up for me 2 years ago on her trip to Texas, but the only thing I could think to do with it at first was to simply hang it up. Absolutely horrid over that green wall. I've since purchased white frames from IKEA and put my 6 favorites in them. It was the colors in those 6 that really helped to steer our choices for other items we'll put in the space, like that red lamp on my desk above.

You can see in the photo below a few of the other items that will be used in the new space. We got blue, teal and kraft tan boxes from IKEA to store a lot of our stuff. They will feature prominently in the new space. I have to laugh now, looking at these photos. It was horrid!

We've got most of the stuff moved out, and we're getting ready to start taking the decals off the walls and then we'll get rid of that awful green. Here's what it looks like right now:

It all has to go somewhere, though, so mom sacrificed her living room. She's being a real champ for the cause:

Ha. Not pretty. But I'm really excited about it. We've chosen a very pale blueish gray for the walls, and most of our other organizing pieces are white. We also have several pieces we've collected to prevent it feeling too much like an IKEA catalog. In the end, we hope it will be a nice, bright, fresh space that we can think and create in. Anything's got to be better than what it looked like, right?