This week I asked an old college friend if she wouldn't mind sharing her organizing project here on blog for everyone to enjoy. She happily agreed, so this is from Sharon Schulte. A sweet mama of 3.
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Craft stuff: I love it, I hate it, I have WAY too much of
it….according to my husband. When we moved a couple of years ago I discovered
dozens of random boxes, bins, baskets, and bags of material, stickers,
play-doh, scrapbooking wares, crayons, projects for would-be gifts, cards…you
get the idea. I tried to put like things together as we unpacked, but I
realized I didn’t have a great way of having storing cloth and unfinished craft
projects, and especially not my sewing machine.
I want to sew more, but I barely enjoy it because I only
feel competent at replacing buttons or sewing straight lines. Besides my lack
of confidence, however, my sewing machine is flipping noxious to set up. I have
to get in the hall closet, move the vacuum, shift whatever is cluttering the
kitchen table, and set it up my machine there. Also, because my craft supplies
are hidden in closets and tucked away in boxes and bins, I don’t do as much
crafting as I would prefer (oh, and my three, young kids are pretty
distracting, too).
So, since our move, my craft supplies and unfinished gifts simply
sat in bins…until I visited a friend’s new house. During her tour, she didn’t voluntarily
open one door, but I am ridiculously curious. I peeked in and was amazed to
find not just another closet for clothes, games, and Christmas storage, but a
tidy little craft room!
She was beaming. One wall of her space houses a sewing
table and a shelf for material; on the opposite wall is a rack for and other
sewing notions. There is even room in
her craft closet for a small cabinet for other creative arts supplies. Seeing
her closet made something click: I have just as many craft supplies as her and
a closet that is underutilized. I could have a mom cave, too!
The next weekend I tackled my upstairs linen closet. As I had unpacked two years before, I had
simply thrown boxes of gifts for future birthdays or holidays, blankets, spare
pillows, and craft junk onto the shelves. I have a rolling cart for
scrapbooking paper and stickers that was once a favorite tool, but now just
sits with barely a sideways glance; it was shoved into my linen closet
wily-nilly, too. When I re-evaluated my closet, though, I knew I needed to get
smarter about the way I reconfigured the shelves. I measured to make sure a
spare chair would fit inside the closet and got to work.
First, I moved the bottom shelves on either sides of the
closet up a few inches so that they would both be at about thirty inches, table
height. I folded the linens more carefully on the right, and sorted the gifts
into age/gender boxes on the left. I needed a board to rest across the lower
two shelves, so I drove around my neighborhood until I saw an already painted
board that just needed a few inches cut off to be my sewing table. I organized
some spare baskets along a lower shelf for flowers, kids crafts, material, and
hot glue, etc. Then I remembered some wall boxes that my neighbors had shown me
earlier in the week. Initially, I bet they were thinking I would use these
quaint cubes for my daughters’ room, but I decided the color scheme is suited
for my little craft closet. I sorted through some spare jars to house my sewing
notions,
clipped a book lamp on the shelf, and rigged an extension cord to the
outlet across the hall. Remember that board from a neighbor’s trash heap that
became my sewing table? I used the piece that was cut off to make a cloth-covered
message board in about an hour. All this took about six hours, from start to
finish.
I still don’t craft nearly as much as I would prefer because
my three children consume a lot of energy, but now when I want to sew up a
quick pillow case or grab some of my adult craft-supplies, I can easily reach
them…and my husband doesn’t notice my bulging bins of craft supplies.
This week Holly organized her holiday decor. Go check her out!
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