Aaaahhh............much betta!

After MUCH effort, the craft room has been reorganized! Yay! I actually reorganized it last summer and wrote about it on my other blog (which was my ONLY blog at that time since I wasn't crazy yet!) and you can read about that here if you are so inclined. This time around I dug into things a lot more and got rid of a bunch of craft supplies that I didn't think I would use. Believe me, I still have enough to outfit a Brownie troop for several years. Below you can see one view of my newly organized space.....this photo is taken from the doorway. I decided to allocate one long wall to my scrapbooking materials and the opposite wall to sewing since I have so much more room now. This photo shows the scrapbooking side.



And this photo shows the sewing side (on the left) and a shelf that I moved downstairs to hold all the boys' scrapbooks. I used to have them in the white cabinet that you will see in a moment, but decided to put a bunch of them on a shelf that kind of displays them and makes them more accessible. My oldest son immediately pulled out two of his books to look at when he got home from school today and realized he could actually walk into the room now without stepping on stuff. So I'm really glad I put their books on the shelf.




Here's a better photo of the sewing space. The table on the left is for cutting fabric and the one on the right will hold my sewing machine which is now in the case beside the chair until I pull it out for my next project. I am getting pretty motivated to work on something in this new space!



The next photo shows a close-up of the scrapbooking table with easily accessible paper and tools and a little lamp for extra lighting.

To the left of the scrapbooking table is a cart with drawers that hold my rubber stamps and stamp pads and the white cabinet which holds a BUNCH of stuff including more scrapbooks that didn't fit on the shelf.

Here is the inside of the cabinet with sewing and scrapbooking things neatly organized. I love this cabinet. We bought it several years ago at Menard's and it holds so much and was pretty cheap.

This photo shows the two shelves above the scrapbooking table. The drawer organizers you see on the bottom shelf used to hold my 8 1/2 X 11 scrapbooking paper and paper scraps. I have reorganized the paper and now these drawers hold various scrapbooking and crafting supplies along with my sticker collection. I also love the little clear boxes on the top shelf. I bought them at Wal-Mart and they have many sizes. The lids are attached and snap shut. These are really inexpensive and are great for organizing. I use them all over my house.

This is the left side of the shelves with my crafting books on top and my 12X12 paper organizers on the bottom. I recently gave up my cart which had lots of my larger scrapbooking paper. It has been repurposed for use by my oldest son. You can read about that here if you want. So.....I bought the 3 drawer organizer at Hobby Lobby and divided my papers by color. I had originally bought the case you see with the pink suitcases on it, but it didn't even come close to holding all my 12X12 paper once I pulled everything out and started sorting it.

The next photo shows how I've organized my scrapbooking paper that isn't 12X12. I had two large file organizers from my days as a Creative Memories consultant. I used one to hold the 10X12 inch paper that CM sells and one to hold my 8 1/2 X 11 inch paper that used to be in the drawer organizers. The paper is organized by color and sits on the left side of my scrapbooking table.

As I mentioned before, I had saved scraps of cardstock and paper from scrapbooking for many years and had it organized by color into individual drawers. While I do use my scraps whenever I can, as I reorganized I realized that the scraps were taking up so much room that could be better utilized. So I decided to recycle most of my scraps and try a new system. The clear box you see in the next photo will sit below my scrapbooking table to hold miscellaneous scraps. Once it becomes too full, I'll have to purge again.

Aaah.........it feels SO good to have my basement tidy again. It has been a big effort, but tonight even DH commented that it is so nice and relaxing to have the clutter cleared up. The back of my van is full of more items headed for donation. This will be my third big vanload since I started Flylady. I am making good headway though and may only have a few more trips to make before I can declare my house "de-cluttered!" I'm really excited to get to that point because then I can start really focusing on deep-cleaning the Zones as they come up. It is so hard not to get over-zealous. I still have some de-cluttering to do in our master bedroom and it's hard to walk past it every day and not dig into it. But I've tried really hard to follow Flylady's advice and not get distracted. Now that the craft room and basement are organized, I have a list of other places that need to be decluttered and I will diligently work on them a little at a time until they are all crossed off my list. Now I am going to sign off and go read in bed! Yay for me!