Ladies and Gentlemen: proudly introducing MY NEW SCRAP ROOM! YAY!!!! It’s FINALLY done, and organized, and clean, and beautiful, and wonderful! And I’m so freakin excited, I can’t stop doing the happy dance (although I’m sure all my neighbors wish I would stop!) For those of you who think I’m weird and/or have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, you can catch up with the rest of the class here (part 1) and here (part 2) and here (part 3.) to see all the before and during pics. Or if you want to skip all that and take the speed course, here’s one of the BEFORE pics:
This was my work surface. It was a little messier than usual since we were already starting to move some things around. I had a small desk with two lamps on it, right by the window. The lighting was so bad, I could only really work on anything during the day, when I had the light from the window coming in.
And now…
Here’s a pic taken in the same area of the room, that shows just part of my really huge built in desk!
Here’s a closeup of the gorgeous trim on the desk. I was thinking about painting the leaves and vines, but I haven’t decided for sure.
Here is where the desk begins. Notice the awesome blue grey wall color? No more brown!
And here it continues all the way down the wall,
and around the corner, into what used to be a closet. I have 14 feet of desk space now!!!! In the closet area, above the corner of the desk, is custom built shelving high enough and deep enough to house my scrapbooks and other plastic storage. Actually though, most of the plastic containers have only a fraction of what they used to have and some of them are even empty. Why, you ask? Because…
this is what lives on the other wall! Most of my goodies were able to come out of plastic storage bins, and into the light where I can see them and USE them!!! So here’s the pic of my long anticipated paper and embellishment shelves…TOTALLY worth the wait!
So, here’s a few pics showing some really great storage solutions and functional features in the room. Some of these were our ideas, and some of them we gleaned off of Crafty Storage (which is a GREAT site btw…I strongly recommend you go check it out, but only when you have lots of time, since you could easily spend HOURS on there!!) and then personalized to make them work for me!
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve asked some of my friends to save babyfood jars for me. I cleaned them out, used Goof Off to get all the labels and adhesive off, spray painted the lids silver, and viola! Embellishment jars! I think the can of spray paint was 97 cents at Wal Mart, and other than that, all that storage was free! (okay, for those of you who are detectives, you may have noticed six Ikea jars above the others…I got those a really long time ago for uber cheap.)
Here’s the ribbon storage idea that I thought was brilliant. We got the plans and general idea from Nichole Heady’s blog Of course, her ribbon doesn’t look as straggeldy as mine! But they used pieces of crown molding on the front of each shelf. Crown molding is cut on a diagonal, so the ribbon sits in there, leaning up against the molding, and pulls easily when you need to cut off a piece…genius!
Here is how I’ve decided to store my cardstock scraps. I saw this idea over on Nicki’s blog and changed it around a little to work for me. Nicki’s is way bigger and prettier than mine, but I like mine, since I can leave it sitting right on my desk ready to use whenever I’m working. I just cut small circles of the colors I had, and glued them to old file folders that I cut in to dividers. It’s all sitting in a shoebox size plastic container at arm’s length!
Here’s two ideas that I really like. Since it would be really hard for me to climb under the desk to plug things in periodically, we mounted a power strip/surge protector on the inside of the desk. Any time I need to plug in a glue gun, my Cricut, whatever, it can go right there, and I don’t even need to lean over to do it!
The second idea here is the curtains I made to go under the desk. I’m also a crazy extreme couponer, so I have some really ugly file cabinets that I keep my newspaper inserts in. Those fit right up under the desk, along with some other bulky items, and you never have to see any of them, but the curtain slides to the side if you need to use anything under there!
The last functional feature I really love is the door! They cut it in half for me!! (EDIT: I used to have big dogs so this was originally built to be functional to keep them out but let them see me so they wouldn’t stress!)
I hope you enjoyed the tour of my little corner of the world. I’m going to get off my keister and make a video pretty soon too. I’ll let you know…ie., don’t hold your breath!
For those of you who took the crash course and haven’t read the history behind this room, all of the furniture was custom built by my neighbor Chris. His wife Suzanne, did the designing, painting, and tons of other stuff. They ripped up my disgusting carpet, replaced the electrical outlets, put in new GLORIOUS lighting, cut the door in half…everything! Of course my sweet hubby helped with painting the trim and other sundry jobs! (I heart him!) Out of pocket, this room cost us a grand total of $22. Yes, $22. No, that wasn’t a typo. We exchanged the neighbors redoing the room for my dog and housesitting for them while they’re on vacation. Yes, I owe them quite a bit of dogsitting! And Chris says he would love to build special orders for any of you who may live close 😉