My New Colorful, Functional Craft Room

Come on in and tour my newly organized and prettied up craft room! This craft room is fun, colorful, and functional and all pulled together on a small budget. This post contains affiliate links when possible, which help to support this blog. Thanks!

Hey there! Welcome to my new organized, colorful craft room! I am loving my new space, and I’m excited to share it with you all today! We have been in our current home for about a year and a half, but it has taken me a while to get this room to the point where I’m pretty happy with it.

When we moved out of our last home, I was most sad to leave behind my craft room that I loved so much. But now that this new space is really set up, I think I like it even more than my old room. It has more storage and work space, so it’s certainly more functional.

This room definitely presented some challenges though. It is long and skinny sun room on the back of the house, with windows filling most of three of the walls. So it’s a bit of an awkward shape without a whole lot of useable wall space. You can see a tour of the space when we first moved in right here or just check out this gorgeous before photo:

Did I mention we had just moved in? And here’s what it looks like now:

Much better, right? I think so. On the left side of the room I have my desk, my printer, and my sewing table. Along the right wall I have two Ikea Expedit units, my marble filing cabinet, and wrapping paper. The cabinets and paper shelves on the back wall were there when we moved in. This was very much a work with what you have, shoe string budget kind of room, so I was happy to have them.

I wanted open shelving on top, so I took off the cabinet doors and filled the shelves with (most of) my yarn stash. I love being able to see what I have at a glance, and all of the colors and textures get me inspired to make something.

The cabinets are old kitchen cabinets that were salvaged from a kitchen remodel, and the countertop is just a piece of MDF that was cut to size. Eventually I’d like to get a real countertop, but for now I just painted the MDF that was already there to brighten it up a bit.

Above the countertop, I hung a piece of pegboard to give me some more storage and to keep the supplies I use the most close at hand. I always have scissors, ribbon, glue, and notecards ready to use at any time. Plus they are pretty!

Besides paper (duh), the paper shelves hold my Minc foils and supplies, Silhouette supplies (like my fave tattoo paper, of course!), craft foam, crepe paper, stencils, and other flat supplies.

To the right, I have my collection of wrapping paper, butcher paper, contact paper, and pretty much anything that comes on a roll. I store it all in a pretty basket I picked up for cheap at Home Goods. The filing cabinet came from my old craft room and holds important papers, receipts – you know, boring filing cabinet type stuff.

The expedit units on this wall are where I store most of my craft supplies. One unit has doors and baskets (we previously used it as a media center in our last home) and the other is filled with boxes organized according to the type of supply they hold.

As I mentioned before, I’ve been using this space for over a year now, but I didn’t get it really organized until recently. It took a few days to do it, but it was totally worth it. I started by completely emptying the room – every last feather, button, and glue stick came out. And then I purged. A lot. I donated boxes of things I knew I wasn’t ever going to use.

When I had narrowed it down to what I wanted to keep, I sorted everything out and made sure that every little thing had a home. I now have boxes for feathers, buttons, watercolors, leather, fabric dye, beads, jewelry findings, rhinestones, etc., etc. Things that are too big or that I have too many of have designated baskets or cabinets, but the main thing is that everything has a place to go.

Now, when I get new supplies, I know exactly where to put them instead of just leaving them in piles on the counter or floor (not that I would ever have done that in the past or anything). Because of this, I have managed to keep everything organized and fairly clean since I organized it in January, which is no small victory for me.

I have a little bit of wall above one unit, and I put that to work with a shelf to hold more boxes, an Ikea rail that holds hole punches, pliers, and my hot glue gun, and my new neon “make” sign, which I love.

The tops of the expedit shelves also offer more storage space and workspace, which is great. I am storing some books, markers, crochet hooks, brushes, and my washi tape collection there.

For my new washi tape storage, I got this tiered jewelry stand from Amazon, which I like a lot, and the rest is tucked into my new color block crochet baskets.

Across the room on the other wall, is my desk, printer, and sewing table. I picked the desk up super cheap at Ikea, and decided to go with the red top, which was super out of character for me, but I really liked the glossy finish.

I still like the glossy finish, but I think I’m ready to switch it out for a white top. I got my chair on craiglist and then painted it white and covered the seat with a pink and red Mexican falsa blanket. That chair is one of my favorite things!

I also love the rugs, which kind of make the room for me. I wasn’t crazy about the tile in the room, so I wanted a rug to cover most of the floor, but I also needed something inexpensive because of that whole shoestring budget thing and because I’m pretty much guaranteed to drop some paint or dye on this thing eventually. My solution was to get two inexpensive 5×7′ rugs from Urban Outfitters (which is a great source for inexpensive rugs – I got the one in my kids’ Disneyland room for 20 bucks!). They don’t have the exact rug I bought any more, but this one is pretty similar.

On top of my desk, I have all the things that I use everyday: my planner, my idea notebook, a scratch pad, pens, pencils, brushes, markers, and my microphone (which I mostly keep there because it looks so cool!).

Above the printer I have a couple of simple DIY art pieces and a hanging wall file to hold the paper I use and print with the most often.

Finally, looking back down the room, you can see one more bit of wall space that I have put to use. I love the way craft paint looks displayed – it’s just so colorful! – and I used the last bit of wall space left in this room to store my paints.

I have had the two floating shelves for a while and I picked up the little house-shaped cubby at Michaels recently. I added the fabric tassel garland, which I had hanging up in my old craft room, for a little something extra.

These shelves are pretty full already, so I may need to add another soon, but it is working for now.

Annnnnd… that’s pretty much it! Thanks so much for taking a peek around my newly cleaned up and organized space. I am loving it, and I hope it gives you some ideas for ways to work with what you have and make your creative spaces work better for you! It’s not a perfectly coordinated space, but it’s a place that makes me excited to work, and that’s the most important thing.

Happy Making!