My new creative corner

With two teenage boys it seemed a necessity to turn the main area of our basement into a games room. This meant relocating my existing craft room to the old computer area.

It's not the biggest room (approx 8.5 x 8.5'). It's really only a widened hallway of sorts. There are 4 doors; one on the left leading into the furnace room; two on the right. The first of which leads into what is currently a storage room (one day to be a bathroom) and the second to a small 5'x5' room that was used for storage but is now dedicated to my punches and dies. For easy access we removed the door to this area. The last leads to the storage "cupboard under the stairs", which currently houses our holiday decorations. This sketch gives a little more of an overview (it's not 100% to scale, but you get the idea)

With four doors and really only 3 walls it took a lot of planning to make this space as functional as possible as well as some ingenuity to keep the cost minimal; but if I do say so myself, it turned out rather well.

So without further ado, here is a little tour of my current space.
Starting left to right:
Alcove shelving. This is home to my specialty papers, paper scraps and Iris carts.

Next are my 12x12 and 8.5x11 paper trays. These hold only cardstock. The watchmaker tins hold shaped/themed brads, eyelets and nailheads. At the end of the peg wall are some misc. supplies and my trays that hold "works in progress". The bottom row under the trays consists of a ribbon tray and basket.

I love "over-the-door" storage solutions. The door to the furnace room has a clear vinyl shoe organizer that I use for my completed card projects. Makes for a very easy overview of what I have on hand.

At the far wall my husband built custom desks with shelving above. The drawers are white bins from Ikea. We used these little metal rails we bought at Home Depot (they come in 8 foot length, we had to cut them to fit) to create "drawer guides" for the bins.
I love that dispite this being a small space I have a dedicated desk for sewig as well as stamping.

right beside the sewing desk is my stamping desk

next is the door to the future bathroom. Again, I'm using an over-door-storage-organizer. This is a towel rack bought at Canadian Tire. I use the little curtain hooks from Ikea to clip up my sticker sheets etc.

Against the little (60 cm) wall between the two door ways I have hung a magnetic board from Ikea as well as a rail with cups for my everday tools. The short end of my work table meets up to the wall.
The watchmaker tins on the magentic board hold all my round eyelest and brads (1/4" and 3/8")

 

Next is the doorway to my "Die cut and punch room". Be prepared. I own over 700 hundred punches. From the left to right of the room:

 

These are little shadow boxes Ikea used to carry. We hung these and then built the peg wall around them so that the wall is flush. It's a total of 9 boxes (right down to the floor). Then my husband made me specialty pegs to hang my cafe rods from for the lever punches. I have a little more room to expand at the top of the wall.

 

The table holds my Accu cut, Sizzix and Punch buddy. Some of my dies are on the peg wall in orginal packaging. The rest are in two Ikea CD towers on the right. There are 4 towers, one is hidden by the doorway. The two remaining towers store my mega punches. We built little raisers (wooden blocks) so that I can store them in double rows on each shelf (2 in back, 2 in front) and still see them. Since I took these photos we have added 3 little wall shelves beside the cd towers/over the right side of the table top. They are the same depth as the CD shelves. I store my embossing folders and some of my stamps on them. Under the table top are 4 towers of 12x12 paper trays. Three of which store all my Clubscrap papers and the last my misc. 12x12 papers. The tote on the left is home to some more punches - punch wheels and those punches I don't tend to use much.

Last but not least, the door to the storage under the stairs. I have one more over-the-door shoe organizer that I use for my chip board alphas.



 I you look at the sketch of the room at the beginnign of this post, you can see that the wall across from the alcove shelving is empty. One day (in the near future) I hope to have a couple of curtain rods with clips there so that I can dispaly my current projects on that wall.

Hope you enjoyed my little tour and maybe some of my storage solutions will be useful in some of your crafting spaces.