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Organize Your Craft Stash in 45 Minutes… or Less!

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I wrote this post as part of a paid campaign with Brother and Blueprint Social. The opinions in this post are my own.

Happy National Get Organized month! Time to celebrate! Or just to organize… since for me, organizing is not the way I celebrate. Organizing has been a huge focus for me in January.  I might have recently had a mini (read: huge) breakdown to John about our apartment and how unorganized I constantly feel. I’ve spent some serious time this winter cleaning out, donating, and chucking items that we don’t use, need, or want.

My closet is in shape and so is the most of our apartment… except for our office. Our office is the bane of my existence. The problem is one that a lot of people have: limited space. We have a beautiful apartment, but it doesn’t have any storage. We don’t have a garage or a shed.

So our office has become our de facto garage. That would be fine except… I work full-time in that office. So that means that I work among boxes of our wedding china (there’s no space for a china cabinet in our apartment), increasing amounts of homebrewing equipment (John’s new passion), and extra furniture. Fun, right?

My project for this winter is the office– so I can be more productive and actually enjoy working in the space I’m supposed to be, well, working in… not avoiding it! And the first thing to get reorganized? The craft room. In less than 45 minutes.

Here’s my before picture:

You’ll see that I already have a bunch of plastic drawers. They’re from my days as an English teacher. Yay! I love reusing stuff. You’ll also see that stuff is just kind of thrown everywhere– that’s so easy to do when there isn’t a plan for a space.

Steps:

  1. Get everything out in the open. See exactly what you’re working with.
  2. Declutter. Get rid of it or give it away if you’re not using it or if it’s broken.
  3. Use a system. I bought bins that fit in the drawers to keep things together. Keeping everything in containers also makes it much easier for crafting– I can just grab the entire bin and go.
  4. Group your items together and place them in bins as you go through your items.
  5. Make sure your system fits your stuff. If it doesn’t, chances are, you won’t put things back where they go. (And then all of that organizing is for nothing. :-( ) Make sure the areas aren’t overstuffed.
  6. Label everything. I used Brother’s P-Touch label maker to detail what was in each bin and each drawer– that way, I have no excuses for not putting something back where it belongs. The awesome thing about the P-Touch labels is that they’re removeable on plastic– score!

Here’s an inside look at a drawer. Everything’s so ready to grab and craft! It makes me happy just looking at it.

And here’s the after photo. Not only is everything organized, it’s also less cluttered as I was able to get rid of superfluous stuff– like marker boxes– when I transferred materials to the bins.


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