What Are You Working On? is for all things hand-made, home-made, and creative in a variety of mediums.
In the last few months we have downsized moving to a much smaller house. It used to be my craft room was spread over two 14 ft X 14 ft rooms. Now it will have to fit in a 10 ft X 10 ft room. Part of the problem is that I do multiple crafts—quilting, embroidery and knitting. The first and last take up the most space. It became clear fairly quickly that there was not enough room for quilting and the many, many skeins of yarns I have. So yarn went to the basement bedroom. Even so, it was going to be very tricky.
Our solution was to go vertical. As much as I liked having a lot of pictures on the wall in the last spaces, these walls would need to be used for storage. As would not only the small closet, but the door of the closet as well. The closet is small and we replaced the hanging rod with shelves.
Below is some of the ways we used space for storing a lot of fabric and tools.
Closet door:
Most shelves in closets leave 5” to 8” in the front. This allows you to do door storage.
This closet had two small doors. We just did the storage on one door because the 4” — 5” of storage sticking into the closet means the non-storage door has to be opened before the storage one.
Still it is a good way to gain some storage space. If you had a one door closet, you’d just have to move the shelving back further towards the hinges. There wasn’t room enough for that here.
These were supposed to be over the door storage units, but they worked better screwed directly into the solid core door.
Pegboards:
Having to go up means using different methods for storing tools , etc. I had this peg board in my last craft space and just moved it here. I still need to rearrange some things for optimal use.
The painting in the left wall was done by my father. It is a paint by number that I cherish.
And of course, shelves:
One of my favorite storage ideas is repurposing an entertainment center to a sewing/quilting center.
We simply added more shelves, which was simple because there already were some holes drilled for adjustable shelves. All we had to do was cut the shelves and buy more clips to put the shelves on.
Of course the real added benefit here is the mess is hidden away.
Other concepts of storage — tall bookcases and tall narrow drawer sets also work well. Also areas under things. I have a tall table to work on and have two sets of drawers under that.
These are just some ideas we have used. The craft room isn’t fully ready yet, but I’m hoping to finish organizing it next week.
So What Are You Working On?