I'd really like to get my wife's craft room organized over the Christmas break but we're both TERRIBLE at designing spaces. We've got a nice big room that is 14x22 upstairs that we'd like to use as a craft room.

We'd like to use the room to do scrapbooking, let the kids do some of their art projects (stickers, etc, no painting) and to store some of our old memorabilia (trophies, plaques, etc). We wouldn't want to display the memorabilia per se, rather just have a nice air conditioned place to store it for now.

I was thinking of doing some sort of wall cabinets along with lower cabinets and workspaces along the walls and then have a big open area in the middle where we could put a fold up table or 2 to work on big projects and put away when not in use.

I could just go to Ikea and buy a buch of storage cabinets and clear bins, but there has to be a better way :) Unfortunately I have no idea what that better way is and was hoping some of you extremely creative folks could help out with ideas on how to best utilize the space!

Any ideas welcomed!

Thanks in advance,

Russell

The key is to CORRAL the chaos ... have bins of appropriate sizes for materials and shelves to put the bins on.

Then LABEL the bins and sort them in whatever order makes sense to you, with things you use most on shelves that are easiest to get at.

http://www.myphotos.yahoo.com/s/2167v1pth3bpta4jtozb

Thanks for the heads up on ana-white.com! I'm a bit of a clutter freak though, in that I like my things organized and hidden. I can't do the rooms with everything out in the open even in organized bins, it just makes me feel overwhelmed.

She has a lot of things with doors too.

If you built one of the media center wall things, with doors and drawers around the LCD TV, with a couple of comfy chairs for crafting and TV watching, then added some storage benches as window seats you could stash a lot of things.

Use the door end of the room for the work tables and you have a multi-function media/craft room.

You need some inactive storage space for the memorabilia. That could be drawers, shelves with boxes, or a closet. Sort through the memorabilia and discard anything that you no longer want to keep. Figure out how much you have left, and how much more you think you will accumulate.

You need to store scrapbooking supplies. How much of which type do you tend to keep on hand? Do they need drawer space, or shelf space? Same for the kids' art supplies--how much will you be storing/using? This requires getting all the scrapbook supplies in one place, all the kids' stuff in one place, etc.

You really can't plan the storage until you know what it is that you need space for. Then I'd go to a couple of stores that sell closet supplies and see what they have to offer--there are a lot of options out there. One thing to consider is that the most easily accessible storage space should go to the things you use the most. The least accessible space should go to the things you use the least, like the memorabilia.