My Craft Room - Before

I have a room in my basement that is (mostly) dedicated to my crafty pursuits.  It is also where the "home office" stuff is, and where my kids do their creating.  But unfortunately, it's also that room where everything that doesn't have a home gets dumped.  Most of the furniture in the craft room is hand-me-down furniture.  ("Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without!!)  But I spend a LOT of time in my craft room, so I decided that it was time for a serious makeover.

Check out these photos and I'm sure you'll agree.

The home office area consists of a beat up filing cabinet (received free from a former employer), a nice wood desk (free from a family friend), and an ugly office chair (free from I-don't-remember).  Both the filing cabinet and the desk are functional, so they stay. The filing cabinet will have a makeover, however. I'm not sure what do to about that chair.

Wow. This photo is embarrassing.  The table here is actually a kitchen table (free from a family friend).  The chair is free from my mother (who refinished it once upon a time).  The shelf thing on top the table came off an old desk we bought at Target 15 years ago.  The mess underneath the table is my kids' "Imagination Box".  The rest of the mess is mine.  The plan is to totally revamp this area with a trip to Ikea.

Like I said, this room is in the basement.  The room itself is about 9' x 15' but it also includes a walk-in closet which is under the stairs.  This is where everything gets dumped.  Just looking at the above photo of the closet makes me cringe.  Of course, I can keep using all these nice storage tubs and whatnot, I just need a better organization system.  The plan for the closet is to store some seasonal decor stuff, some craft stuff I don't use as often, gift wrapping supplies, and my sewing stuff.

And then there's the kids' area.  The table and chairs are still nice (free from husband's boss) but the rest of their stuff has never really been organized in a very functional way.  I'm planning to have some sort of shelf system where they can see the supplies they have and be inspired to create.  Hopefully, the system won't look cluttered AND it will be easy for them to put stuff away when they are done.  (Ha ha.)

Ok, so we are all agreed that this room needs some help?  I thought so.

Step one: remove everything from the room and paint the walls!

This photo was taken before I started painting.  I was just shocked by the contrast between all the cluttered pictures above, and this empty picture.

Of course, now the family room temporarily looks like this:

Yikes.

Friday while the kids were at school, I emptied the craft room and painted all the walls.  I was starting to think I had bitten off more than I could chew, but now I am SO glad that I didn't skip this step.  The walls were in awful shape and dirty.  I would not have been happy to put all the fresh new furniture in the room with the walls in that condition.  Plus, now that everything is out of the room, it's only coming back into the room if it's supposed to be there and it has a specific place to go.  I may be throwing some things out.

I expected to have to do a second coat of paint on Saturday but was thrilled to see that the walls looked great after one coat.  I was painting a new beige over a different color beige, so that probably helped.  The color I chose was called "Dapper Tan" - one of the Glidden colors from Home Depot.  When I first put it on the walls I didn't think it looked dapper OR tan and I was a little afraid.  It looked peachy.  Like skin that had actually never had a tan.  But when it dried, it darkened up and I'm really liking it.

In this photo below, the walls are completed and I'm working on painting a bookcase.  This bookcase is special because my grandfather made it for me when I was a kid.  It feels very wrong to be painting it because Grandpa was always very fond of exposed wood grain, but I really wanted to keep the bookcase in my craft room and all the furniture I'm going to get from Ikea will be white.  So white it is.

There is still MUCH to be done, but now that you've seen the awful "before" photos, the "after" photos are going to look spectacular!