My Craft Room: Before and After

Let me dive right in:

Here is what my craft room looked like at the end of March

The builders left the walls painted in wall primer tinted a greenish yellow that showed the cement color behind the walls. It looked much worse than this photo.

One of the first things I did was to shift all my craft things and furniture to the next room. Please be warned, the mess is likely to startle and horrify! :D

Most of my stuff was pretty organized, but mostly in big, labelled totes that looked untidy on the shelves. After the laborious, multiple-coat woodwork painting, I first painted the walls with leftover white paint. And left a taped rectangle on one wall...

Why? I'll show you in a bit! 

So here is my craft room AFTER the painting! 

Tadaaaa!

That's my sewing machine on an old computer table on the left. And can you see why I taped that rectangle off? One coat of special paint transformed it into a blackboard where I can draw or write as the fancy takes me!

Of course I have a white board too...  one can never have too many boards!!!

What's that, you want to see how the cupboards are organized? Are you sure? Ok, here goes... Let me open the cupboard on the left...

I don't know how long this state of affairs is likely to last, viz., the super organized look. But at least I will know where to look to find everything. The rotating spice rack on the middle shelf came with me from Houston and sat gathering dust in my kitchen cupboard for a long time because, let's face it, we Indians do not use dinky amounts of spice in our curries and refilling the tiny plastic bottles was a huge chore. So now they hold my beads! 

And yes, those are recycled and reinforced shoe boxes on the top shelves. In fact the whole row of shelving on the top contain lots of cardboard boxes. I can never bring myself to throw them away. As you can see, they can come in very, very handy!

Here are the drawers beneath:

They hold my cotton yarns and threads of different weights. 

Let's see the cupboard on the right:

Those are my craft books on the top, they are two layers deep. The two shelves below them are full of jewelry findings as well as finished pieces. The right side of the cupboard is devoted to paper goods. Can you see Shamu there, guarding my paper goods? He's been with me from the time we visited Sea World in San Antonio back in 2003. 

One drawer below this cupboard is filled with craft paints and varnishes:

I have left the right drawer empty and the two large bottom drawers have extra boxes, an iron etc.

It's true what the decorators say, "A coat of paint can transform a room". I can feel the change in the energy when I go there to make things now. On my  wish list - material to make some nice curtains and a comfy upholstered chair on which I can put up my feet and crochet to my heart's content. I'll be getting the first soon and sewing up some cafe style curtains. Our downstairs sofa will have to make do for the time being for the second item!