My 4 step craft closet mini makeover

Last year after Christmas, my laundry room exploded. Ok, not really, but you'd think that a bomb went off in there based on how it looked. It was mostly due to a lack of pre-Christmas prep (aka getting rid of junk to make room for new stuff), and the laundry room just happened to be the nearest place to stash stuff that had no home.

This year, I was smart enough (and home enough) to know that if I didn't do a little bit of prepping, our craft closet was going to explode. My kids are crazy nuts for artsy-craftsy projects right now, and I knew that they would find plenty of projects under the tree this year. Over the past year I've done everything in my power to keep a small area of a "bonus" closet that we have in the hallway available for craft projects. But, similar to my laundry room, it tends to accumulate junk over time.

I've worked on this closet several times since starting this blog- which just goes to show you that organizing is an ongoing process that needs periodic love and care to keep it functional.

This time I followed my 4 step Clean, Smart, Simple Style process- and here's the documentation.
(If you've just randomly landed on this page, check out the 4 steps to a closet that you love)

I forgot to take a picture immediately before starting- but for reference- here is the closet that I am talking about. This closet initially started out as almost entirely devoted to pots and pans with some craft stuff stashed up high (left picture), and then after a bit of rearranging earlier this year I condensed the pots and pans a bit so that I could move some of the craft supplies to the lower portion of the closet (right picture). The problem was that our arts and crafts collection kept growing...so just imagine a much more cluttered version of this closet for the starting place of my latest project.

-{Clean}-

For me, this involved throwing away a lot of dried up paint, used up coloring books, and random scraps of paper that weren't worth saving anymore. This step alone helped a ton!

-{Smart}-

The main thing that I did during this step was to re-evaluate my use of space. The "before" pictures show that I was using the bottom shelf, and some empty bottom space in a closet- but I also still had half of a higher shelf set aside for paint. Last year when I decided to combine my arts and crafts with my pots and pans- it made sense to keep some of the stuff out of reach of my kids- but by now I am encouraging my 5yr old to get herself set up with projects instead of always counting on me for help. So once again, I moved around some of the pots and pans, to get ALL of the craft related items on the two shelves closest to the bottom of the closet

-{Simple}-

To get everything back into the closet in the most organized way, I needed to do some major condensing.  I unboxed and combined all 75 of the craft kits that we got for Christmas. Just as an example, here's the contents of a playdoh kit on top of the kit. The contents take up about 1/4 of the space that the store box takes up.

I have a clear box from last Christmas that holds all of our clay/playdoh tools- and it easily holds the contents of probably at least 5 "kits."

In addition to using some clear storage tubs that I already owned, I just grabbed some old shoe boxes, and some boxes from recent online photo purchases. I am a tiny bit of a box hoarder around the holidays because I never know what size box I will need to ship something...and I think shoe boxes are great for storing odds and ends, so I almost always save them in our basement storage "just in case."

This is pretty much how my closet looked just a few days after Christmas as I found homes for all of our new supplies, and I was completely content to keep it this way for as long as necessary. I was considering wrapping some of the shoe boxes, and slapping decorative labels on everything just to "pretty it up" a bit at some point- but I hadn't decided for sure what I wanted to do. It didn't bother me to leave it like this temporarily because the closet was completely functional and organized at this point.

-{Style}-

I WAS completely content..but then I was walking past the Christmas clearance section in Target and I saw these beautiful sparkly boxes...

...and these cute shirt boxes.

It didnt' take me long to envision all of my mis matched shoe boxes replaced with beautifully coordinated purple storage boxes. So, 9 boxes and $15 later, I brought everything home- penned some quick labels and filled them with goodies. *(Remember how I said to be patient with this part...well if I had decided to buy these boxes BEFORE Christmas, it would have cost me almost $50...so clearance pricing was definitely worth it!)*

Then I created matching labels for the boxes that I already owned.

And back into the closet they went!

Due to the fact that this closet is in an interior hallway that gets absolutely no natural light, this isn't as grand of an "after" picture as I'd like for it to be- but I'm pretty happy with how it functions. 

If we had plans to make this place our permanent residence, I'd probably paint the inside of this closet and add another shelf- but for now it is working great as a fairly unglamorous arts and crafts/pots and pans storage closet (with a terribly crooked bottom shelf that I never noticed until I took this picture).

The purple boxes make me smile whenever I open it- which is a million times a day- and act as a great motivator to keep everything where it actually belongs.