Thursday, March 22, 2012

Craft Room Blues


"Nothing is work unless you'd rather be doing something else." ~ George Halas

I love many things about the craft room we created out of our covered parking space a number of years ago. Every morning there is wonderful light streaming in from the window on the left in this picture. I still love the cheerful yellow paint I chose for the walls. I love the ceramic tile floor, and even the plastic table and chairs (love it when my family comes in on a Saturday morning to sit with me and drink coffee while I putter). I even love the fact that because it's pretty small, I can usually just turn around and grab what I want without getting up.

But as you can see, it is full of junk! It often serves as the family dumping ground for things we don't know where else to put. And okay, I'll admit it, my packrat tendencies have also influenced the state of this room. I've been scouting out ideas on the Internet, and trying to weed through the junk bit by bit. But it occurred to me that the best thing I could do would be to simply take everything out, wash, patch and repaint the walls, and then decide very carefully what is allowed back in and where it should go. Part of my problem is, I have things I would love to donate somewhere, but have no clue where to take them!

Since I don't happen to have a storage locker handy to hold the entire contents of this room while I purge, I'll have to keep working piecemeal. But the first order of business really needs to be packing up what I don't want to keep and finding a place to take it. We're only talking here about useful things in good condition, like books and rubber stamps. I have no qualms about dumping out trash! Unless of course it clearly might come in handy one day.

Ahem...

Eventually, I hope to be able to show photos of the decluttering and revamping of my craft room. But first, sadly, I have to work. I have a ton of projects to translate. It's so hard to focus on that when my mind keeps jumping to cleaning/reorganizing!

5 comments:

Joansie said...

Oh, I can so relate. I have bins (and I mean lots of them) of yarn that is just ok but afraid to part with it in case in my retirement years I can't afford to buy more yarn or perhaps I might have the time to now use it.

Can't wait to see the results of your makeover. BTW....I love the color of your walls.

Joansie said...

I forgot to mention to check the IKEA web site for storage ideas. I ordered their catalog and it is wonderful. I've been to the store in Montreal and hope to go to the one in CT or MA soon.

Rushd Lady said...

Can't you have a boot sale? Do you have charity shops there either?
I'm kinda at the same point you are. Mom had a craft studio/office built for me on Valentine's Day, but we have yet to move out there because we haven't been able to paint the walls -- we need a nice sunshiny day like your walls so everything can dry, but it's been raining cats and dogs here and I'm itching to get out my stuff and CLEAN! Good luck on your project! By the way, I skipped over here from Facebook. :)

Stefanie said...

That is so cool you have a craft room! What a happy place.

Sandy said...

Your craft room looks like a warm and comforting place to create. Don't worry too much about the clutter. It is all creative fodder!