Craft Closet

I love crafting supplies, office supplies, school supplies, and really any supplies I can get my hands on. I also think that I have the opposite problem of those hoarders on TV. Like when I see a mess my heart rate goes up and my brain says it needstobecleanNOW.

Intro the craft closet at church...

I seriously hear like screeching scary music when I look at that picture. The poor baby has been neglected, disrespected, and just plain overlooked (like it has feelings right??) for like YEARS- we're talking Elmers glue bottles that dated back to 1997. That's almost vintage right?

Step 1? Telling the hubby. He would have never ventured into this closet on his own. Yes he worked there, but craft supplies aren't really something he uses very often. I hardly ever go in there either, but I needed VBS supplies. Once I told him the issue (it was more of a complaint) he was like "how about WE clean it out, buy the supplies to organize, and do it ourselves?" Obviously I was onboard, but I wasn't sure where we would find the time to undertake this challenge. (especially with a 2 1/2 year old!).

I knew from some prior organizing experience that EVERYTHING had to come out. We didn't leave ANYTHING in there.

Yep it was a mess in the hallway...

The best purchase we made was the little plastic shoe boxes. With it getting to be dorm season, Wally had 5 packs for $4.83! That's less that $1 a piece which is a GREAT price! Since we took everything out we had a pretty good idea of everything we had. So I started labeling boxes, and more boxes, and even more boxes. I sorted things into similar categories (glitter with confetti, etc).

For really small things I picked up 1 pack of a "lunch box organizer". It came with 8 or so smaller container to put really small things like googley eyes and aquarium rocks.

By the way does anyone like googley eyes as much as me??

also does anyone else find colored googley eyes a little creeptastic??

We cleared up the toilet paper rolls and baby food jars. We basically kept them in the same containers, but we just neatened them.

The teacher side of me shuttered when I saw the bulletin board borders crammed on a shelf. I store my bulletin board borders at school in a long box (that is actually kind of awkward).

I saw this idea on Pinterest a while ago and HOW COW what a difference.

We're talking $1.84 for 4 of these HUGE binder clips!! It was actually Josh's idea to use a shelf bracket to "display" these. A few of them were crammed like this guy, but hopefully gravity will work on him a little.

We had high hopes for the bulletin board paper here.

They had a rack to put these on but after messing with it we decided it's missing some pieces. It wasn't worth mounting the thing on the wall and risking a catastrophic fallingout of paper.

These rolls are SUPER heavy. So for now they will just sit in the corner.

This feels like a completely different space! We were super blessed by the amount of shelving in there. We also doubled the boards (the extras were in the corner) to make each shelf more sturdy.

Before and after:

The best part?? Room to grow. And since we anticipate leaving this church in a few weeks, we can only HOPE that those who come behind us will use these empty (pre-labeled boxes) to grow.

{sorry about the wonky fluorescent lighting}

and proof that the hallway is totally clear!

Also, the cleaning ladies were there as I was finishing so the closet/hallway floor got vacuumed!

Have I mentioned how much I HATE cardboard boxes??? They don't stack well, they fall apart, and you can't see in them:

I vowed to myself to be done before 9:00pm... All in all we worked 1pm-5pm, and 7pm-9pm. My mom wrangled Luke during the afternoon and I finished up that evening after dinner.

and taking out 4 huge bags of trash in the rain was NO FUN.

I am so proud of this space. Although we won't be around to see if it stays that way, I feel like we did the best we could at that time. We spent right under $75 for all the storage/labeling supplies. Not bad considering how many boxes we added!