My New Craftroom!

 We have finally finished remodeling what used to be a storage room into a beautiful Craftroom!

This room serves several purposes, I am a Stampin' Up! Demonstrator, so I hold classes and all my stamping supplies in this room.  I run a non-profit organization with my daughter which requires a lot of supplies and paperwork.  Plus I am a dish-a-holic and I do tablescaping as a hobby - so I need additional storage for dishes and seasonal decor.

We live on a hill that goes down to a lake so we have a lot of different levels in this house, it is not your typical floor plan.  This room was a dark storage room underneath our garage, it had no heat or air conditioning or even a real ceiling!! 

There is a bit of crawl space storage behind the back wall and a short faux brick wall on the opposite wall that kind of covered up some hot water heating that only put out enough heat to keep the pipes from freezing.  Above this funky little faux brick thing that stuck out from the wall - was cedar shake siding.  This was never an outside wall so I am not sure why this was ever done.  There is one window in the room and a very old door leading outside. But I knew that this would be the perfect place to convert the space into a craft room, but it would take a major redo and we had lots of other rooms to do first.

In the mean time I had to rig up my desk because no legs could go against the wall with that heating pipe in the way. So finally, 5 years after we moved in and while we were staying home and social distancing - I just started ripping everything apart!

It was actually very satisfying to take a sledge hammer to that little faux brick wall, but it was a pain in the back putting it all in buckets and hauling up stairs and out the door!

After much grueling work, and a ton of moving everything from one side of the room and then to the other side 15 times.  We finally started making great progress.  

Once the new flooring and the ceiling were in - it really started to take shape.

One of my favorite things is the transformation of my old china cabinets.  I removed all the doors, drawers and about 280 screws and painted it with chalk paint.  This took me about 2 weeks to complete but I will always have something I was proud to accomplished in those first couple of weeks of COVID where we were all staying home. 

Once I finished it - I made a trip to a resale shop to get rid of half the stuff that I had jammed inside because I didn't want to just junk up my new, pretty cabinets!

I ordered some additional Kalax shelving and Alex drawer units from Ikea, but that took forever to come in!  I also ordered a couple of more pieces of Stamp-N-Storage organizational units to fit into my Ikea cubbies.  I have my current 12 x12 Designer Series Papers in their paper holder that just slides right in the Kalax shelf.  I also love this punch storage, its easy to find the punch I need.

Organization is a must when you have so many supplies.  I love Stamp-n-Storage's ink and marker holders.  I hope to keep adding more of their storage pieces as I go.

I reserve the first row of my ink storage for my blocks, a shammy in a case for cleaning my stamps and my Stampin' Up! dimensionals fit perfectly into one of the slots.  These are all things I use often and like to have at my finger tips.  I keep my 8 1/2 X 11" paper in a elfa letter size mesh file cart, I like the convenience of pulling over to where I am working and picking out the right color.

My back wall storage is all brought over from my old craft room.  

In this photo you can see the new small heating and air conditioning unit we had installed.  I love it- it works with a remote control- If I get to hot I turn down the tempurature and to cold, I just turn it up!

This is all old Martha Stewart Craftroom furniture that you used to be able to buy through Home Depot's website, but it is all discontinued now.  The cubbies on top of the far cabinet are just old boxes covered with scrapbook paper and labeled with it's contents - any easy cheap storage solution!

Lots of different bins hold supplies such as glue guns, fabric, etc. and my pink curtain and barn door are my entrances to the additional crawl space storage where all my Christmas and season decor is stored.

This is Lucy - she is half St. Bernard and half Golden Retriever - but looks more like a Newfoundland. 

She loves to be down here when I work.  The floor we put in down here is from LL Flooring, called Tapestry Oak, perfect because it hides a multitude of stuff and it has such an artsy flair to it.

It was a ton of work.  But we love it!!

It is so much brighter and certainly more inspiring than the dungeon it used to be!

I hope you enjoyed the little tour of my new favorite hang out!