I'm Cleaning Out My Closet - My Craft Closet That Is!

 

Hi everyone! I hope that y'all are having a wonderful holiday season and that you have had lots fun quality time with your friends and family! We have been blowing and going at the casa the past few weeks: we hosted Thanksgiving at our house for the first time this year and were busting at the seams with 14 guests (but so worth it and so much fun); we have had work Christmas parties, friends' Christmas parties and family Christmas parties; and my Mom and I got to preview the first hour of Season 4 of Downton Abbey!!! It's going to be a GREAT season...even though I was absolutely positive that my crush Matthew (sigh) was going to have a full recover after his little fender bender (tear)....

 

 

I mean come on ladies...can I getta "Meow"!!!!! We also hosted a "May the December 14th Be With You" party where we had friends over, Matt cooked a massive batch of chili, and we watched the final three Star Wars episodes (it was originally supposed to be a "May the 4th Be With You" party on May 4th...but we weren't in the house yet, so we improvised). After each episode, we watched the the Family Guy version and it was awesome how they track the original story lines!

 

 

One thing that we haven't done over this holiday season, however, is decorate the house. Although I was not too happy about this at first...Matt's view is that we need to clean up our existing messes before we create new ones.  And considering that we have been in the house for three months and I still have two rooms and two closets that look like this:  



I can't really argue with his logic. So the first mess that I am tackling is my craft/wrapping closet. This closet was an unexpected bonus room for me. When we first started remodeling the house, we thought that we had to keep the A/C unit and furnace in their existing location on the second floor of the house, but subsequently found out that we could move all that gear into the attic. ***Yeah*** Once everything was relocated, we ended up with a large closet that I decided to turn into my super girly craft and wrapping closet.  The plan was to create a space where I could keep all of my gift wrapping supplies and crafting supplies nice and neat and organized. You can see my original plan for the craft closet here and here. Although it was 100% empty clean when we moved in, it began filling up with boxes and such as we unpacked and, unfortunately, quickly turned into this hot mess:

Eeek!!! This was completely overwhelming! I have a hard enough time keeping my closets organized when they start out somewhat put together...but it is completely different when things have become so bad that I am scared that I will be swallowed by the avalanche of crap stuff that comes tumbling out as soon as I open the doors.

So I gathered my composure, went back to the holy grail of organization instruction and guidance (a.k.a. www.IHeartOrganizing.com) and followed Jen's step-by-step process for organizing a mess.  First, I removed all of the content from the closet. Second, I organize everything into piles by category (in this case: trash, craft and wrapping supplies, storage containers and miscellaneous). 

The next step will be to go through the craft and wrapping supply pile and further organize it into easy-to-manage categories (e.g., jewelry making supplies, ribbons, wrapping paper, bow making supplies, paint, etc.).  I will show you that in the next post...but for now, let's take a quick a look at how the closet looked after I removed all of the junk!

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much better!!!! As you can see from the walls and the ceilings, I decided to go super bright with the paint colors. I did this because there are no windows in the closet and I wanted to make it as bright, cheery and girly as possible. So I chose a bright pink for the walls and a bright yellow for the ceiling. I also added built-in cubbies so that I can easily categorize all of my crafting and wrapping goodies.

 

Above the lower cubbies, I added two sets built-in wall shelves for additional storage options.

 

The white wall space above the lower cubbies and between the upper wall cubbies is going to get some fun wall paper. However, because the closet was previously filled to the brim and the wall was not accessible, the wall paper will be installed in next week. ***Yippy*** I wanted some high contrasts and thought that a black-and-white wall paper would fit the bill since the black would pop off of the pink walls, yellow ceiling and white cabinets. I found this awesome paper, which has a similar Moroccan pattern as the Walker Zanger tiles that we have in our master bathroom shower, and immediately fell in love!

 

Thanks to some poor Photoshop work, you can get the general idea where the wallpaper will go.

The space between the wall cubbies is designated for my wrapping paper and ribbon. I plan to install several dowels between the cubbies where I will hang the paper and ribbon....kind of like this:

 

or this:

 

 

And to kick up the girly factor even more (as if pink walls and a yellow ceiling weren't enough, ha!), I also added this pretty little crystal light that I found on Overstock.com. 

 

 

I love how the light looks when it is on and the cool shadows that it throws on the ceiling.

 

Oh, and the yellow ceiling is actually a lot brighter than the honey mustard color that it is coming across in the picture. Once I got the closet clean, the next step was to hit my storage container collection:

 

 

For the lower cubbies, I designed them in such a way that I could fit four of the photo boxes from Micheal's in each cubbie. The boxes are about $2.99 a piece, but you can usually get them on sale for $2 each. That is some serious storage bang for my buck! For the larger items, I actually lucked out and found some pretty black faux leather storage containers from Home Goods that fit in the cubbies perfectly. SCORE!

Each cubbie can also hold two 12"x12" paper storage boxes (which you can see in the photo above). After playing around with the storage containers that I had on hand (I shopped the house and also found some other wicker containers that I previously picked up from Home Goods), this is what I came up with:

 

 

I want to get four more 12"x12" paper containers for the two empty cubbies on the bottom.  I also need two more white photo boxes for the top right cubbie. I plan to add the Martha Stewart labels to each of the large storage containers so that everyone can easily tell what is in each container. And I am considering wrapping the top of the photo boxes with some black and white material to add some interest...but that will happen some time in the future. So my next step is to get the "craft supply and wrapping supply" pile organized, out of the hallway, and into the closet.  I will keep you posted on how that turns out. But fore now, let's just enjoy a loverly before and after shot before we go!

 

 

Yeap, definitely better! Thanks so much for stopping by and have a wonderful day!!!