Transform Your Craft Room: Creative Storage Solutions

Do you have a room in your house that for whatever reason ends up just becoming a big mess? Well, that is what my craft room has become. My goal is to share some tips from the re-do of our Texas home’s Craft Room. Let’s do this, friends! 🙂

When my MIL moved back to California last fall, she left two inexpensive “closets” which she had used for storing items in her garage. They are those build-it-yourself 6′ tall white cabinets which you can find at any big box store. An alternative choice is picking up some from Ikea, which are similar, like we used last summer when we refashioned our Primary Bedroom Closet:

• Part 1 – Research & Drawing Out Closet Plan
• Part 2 – Painting & Removing Old Shelving
• Part 3 – Finishing (The Closet) & Final Reveal

I have been wracking my brain for months on what to do with our craft room to find better ways to put things away. These closets will solve a major storage problem in this room.

For storage:

Here is how the craft room has looked these past six years. I have collected a mishmash of cardboard boxes and plastic containers for storing faux florals, craft supplies, photographs, sewing items and more craft items. None of these storage boxes match and sometimes this really bothers me.

I enjoyed having these pretty boxes out on display for many years. Now I want a calmer more restful place to be when I craft or sew. All this clutter makes me not want to come in this room.

Creative storage solutions

In our previous home, my craft room was a square and the 8′ closet was about a foot deeper (just to the left out of view). I was able to store a ton of large plastic boxes in that closet and hang things.

I also used a former television cabinet in which to store photograph boxes.

For this craft room, Mr. Ethereal was cleaning out the garage and that’s when I saw the two cabinet’s pieces stacked and bungeed. I realized they would be the perfect solution to this craft room’s storage needs!

Creating a wall of similar cabinets would bring calm and cohesion to this room.

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But first, we paint

Would you believe that this was the very first room I painted in this house? Like, right after we moved in! Yet I did not paint the ceiling… My bad!

This ceiling is the VERY LAST THING I need to paint after six years of continuous painting in our 2100 sq. foot home. YEAH!!! (The crowds rejoice…)

I needed to do a little touch-up paint, too, after we took down the shelf and to take care of some scuff marks with a little paint. That shelf will be re-purposed out in the big garden shed.

A large pile of things moved off the old shelving and waiting out in our living room. 😉

The night before we drove up to visit our son and grandson, we moved our original white cabinet in from the garage.

This cabinet has seen a lot of uses! It housed our canned goods and stored staples when we lived in our second house. Later, it again held those same staples at the front of one of our storage units when we were living in our first RV in California for almost two years.

Here in this room, it will be centered on this wall with the two other matching cabinets flanking it.

With all three cabinets right next to each other, this will give this room that clean-line, French-Country feel I want to achieve for this room. I am excited about this creative repurposing of all three cabinets.!

Plus they cost $0.00 as we already had them. I know the middle cabinet we purchased for $110.00 and that was at least 15 years ago.

DIY Project: Repair pressed wood products the easy way

If you end up breaking a piece off your cabinets, like we did twice during this cabinet installation, here’s an easy fix:

• Gather wood glue or regular white glue (which I used here)
• cotton balls
• your project piece

Repair Instructions:

• Get a few cotton balls and separate the fibers a bit.
• Pour some glue onto your cotton fibers and blend the glue into the cotton with your fingertips. This created a fiber mesh.
• Press this into any spaces in your wood repair project which needs more “wood.” Once dry, these fibers will harden and you can then drill through to make any holes.

If the repair on a wood piece will be some place which will take a lot of stress, then use a heavier, stronger bonding glue to create the new cotton fiber mesh repair. In our case, this will be sufficient for this piece which will go across the bottom back of this third cabinet.

Building out the two matching cabinets

So this week, I pulled out the instruction booklet and began screwing all the little hardware pieces onto each cabinet panel and doors. Mr. Ethereal came home from work and helped finish each cabinet and set them in place.

Since he had built them for Gramma, he knew exactly how they went together; whereas, I was having a hard time envisioning how they should fit together. He mainly built the first cabinet as my skills were definitely rusty!.

After helping put together that first cabinet, I confidently built the second one to about half-way. Hubby helped “bang” a few parts together when he got home from work.

Important tip: You will want to really study your instructions and to try to envision how these cabinets will look facing outward and upright. We had to swap the top and bottom “C2” pieces of the second cabinet so the “locking cams” were on the top of the cabinet and not inside the unit.

We also had the two bracing pieces at the back of the unit upside down so the finished melamine wasn’t visible. To us, that wasn’t a deal breaker, but we did pull off the top and bottom pieces, which meant unlocking and knocking off one long side to remove pieces and switch them. A pain but glad it was done!

The final craft room reveal

I am loving how the Craft Room looks now! It is bright and cheery and sooo much less crowded. Just what this minimalist girl’s heart needed!

Now I won’t feel overwhelmed when I come in here to start a project or to sew something.

More to bring in to continue filling these cabinets, but I think I’m ready to spend the summer days working on photo albums to give to our grown-up kids for Christmas… 🙂

Let me know what you think of how the Craft Room turned out. Are you working on transforming any rooms in your house this summer? I hope you found some helpful tips here today! 🙂

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Happy summer crafting,