Wednesday, August 5, 2015

Craft Closet Makeover

I've been trying to get my craft room more organized so that I can actually craft in it.. I still need to get rid of a large shelf that has no place in this room, but I knew that the biggest task I still had... Was this.......


 Oh geez, I can't believe I'm posting this..


When we first moved in last November, my craft room was the temporary catch-all and general storage for stuff we didn't know how to organize. It was a jungle of boxes and the occasional missing dish towel. As time went on, the room got cleared out, and I was able to see the craft room in the mess. Except for the closet. It remained a terrible eyesore that kept getting worse.

I knew that this room wouldn't feel right unless I was able to actually use this closet, and not as a catch-all for stuff we didn't need anyway. I'm trying to sell those Sterilite drawers and that oak shelf leaning up against it is going back to my parents. We were also storing my wedding dress back in there.. I'm not terribly sentimental about that, so that'll probably get consigned or donated, if I'm not able to just sell it (I'm tiny, and based off the seamstress's reaction to my alterations, I don't think it'll be easy to find another girl able to wear it).

The first step was to just clear it all out, including that wood shelf, and I patched the holes in the wall:

The baseboards were unfinished and I figured, while I was in here, I may as well do it right. So the baseboards got the caulk treatment.

 Muuuuch better...
Then everything got a few coats of paint. I keep white glossy enamel on hand since we use it for the trim and I find it useful for lots of other paint projects. And I had some flat white paint from a previous project for the walls. I might've gone with a color if I hadn't had the white already, but ya know how that goes. Besides. This closet is small and dark and it needed some serious brightening up.

At this point, it already looked twice as big as it did before.

I did the baseboards first. Then the walls. I didn't bother taping the baseboards off since it's all white. I'm not one of those people that can see minute differences in various whites. I can't see much until we get into off-white territory. Anyway, one coat down. =D

At this point, I ran out of the wall paint. Gah!! I only had a quart and thought it would be enough, for sure! Nope! Back to Lowe's to get another. But I found out that they'd discontinued that particular line. Double Gah!! Thankfully the nice man there showed me which one would work just the same and I was off on my merry way.

With the painting completed (finally), I got to work on the shelves. I knew I wanted to use the two skinny sides as "sections" for different types of craft. I bought the Rubbermaid Homefree top rail and uprights (and extensions to get them down to the floor), but the brackets and shelves are the FastTrack line.

As a side note on this, I love the Homefree system (it's in my bedroom closet), but my Lowe's was out of the shelves, and said the line was getting discontinued and they weren't getting anymore in stock (???). So I went with the FastTrack shelves. The brackets from both will work on the uprights for both, but the FastTrack shelves need to have the FastTrack brackets. It all worked out in the end. =)

For the center portion, I wanted to use a pegboard. I wanted to have all my tools where they're easy to get to, as well as some of my scrapbook supplies. I got a 2'x4' pegboard and picked up some cheap wood to put on the wall to space it out.


Since this area only allowed me to hit 1 stud, I put three screws in the stud and then used 6 drywall anchors (3 on each side). These are the anchors I used. They actually came with the Homefree parts, but I put the rail into 4-5 studs, so I didn't bother using them up there.


And these anchors! They work great, and now that I know how to use them, I love them, but seriously, they need to give instructions with every packet. It took me forever to figure out that I was folding them wrong to put them in. This is how you fold them.


I also use pliers to hold them closed while I hammer them into the wall. My fingers thank me every time.

Once the anchors were in place, I drilled the wood pieces into the wall on the stud and into the anchors. Then my hubby held the pegboard in place while I drilled it onto the wood pieces. Unfortunately it shifted at some point and you can see the wood poking out. I'm not sure how that happened, but I didn't feel like fixing it. I plan on getting some trim to frame it and make it look pretty anyway, so I'll just cover it up then. Maybe I'll take the time to fix it.. But for now, I'm just glad to have a place to put my stuff!


It's definitely a work in progress, and I'll do a total room reveal once I get it done, but for now, here it is!

Don't you just love pegboards?!

1 comment:

  1. Great job. You make me want to hang pegboard SOMEWHERE !

    ReplyDelete

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