This new place has a 2nd bedroom that is a very nice size and my goal was to have a scrap/craft area, office area, and {hopefully} get a twin bed for someone to sleep in if we had overnight company. I'm not sure I can get the bed in there, but I might be able to find a chair that unfolds into a sleeper. I know there's no room for a sleeper sofa (maybe a sleeper love seat but those are expensive) so maybe a sleeper chair would work.
I had been using plastic tables after I sold the WorkBox and those just weren't working for me. I usually worked right in the middle and, since they folded, it was not great. Any time I'd try to do any stamping, it would not stamp cleanly. I'd have to go into the kitchen to use the solid surface in there. So I started looking around the Internet to see what others were using.
Jetmax Cubes... I had seen these at Michael's but hadn't really researched them. Once I did, I found that a lot of people love, love, LOVE their cubes and that convinced me that I could build my room with them. I can tell (now that I'm finished) that I needed to put a little bit more thought into the layout and exactly what cubes I needed. I should have bought more paper storage (I got two and could have used two more) and less drawers. I tried to see what everyone used as working surfaces and didn't really find anything that said how deep people had made their work area, or how they'd gotten it that deep.
Once I lined up the cubes (which I put together all by myself!), I knew they needed to be anchored but I also knew that I couldn't put a toe board along the wall of this unit because of the holes it would leave behind. Ron's friend, Chuck, is a carpenter/home builder so Ron asked him if he would help me out. I knew what needed to be done, but I didn't have the skill to do it. Chuck jumped in and we got it done. Yesterday, I started working on the room and getting all of the boxes unpacked and/or moved out of there. (In order to do part of it, I had to clean out the hall closet to make room for stuff that was still packed and I now have a garage sale box in the living room, plus two boxes of nick-knacks that I can't unpack until I get a bookcase or two.)
I'm really pleased with how the room turned out, although I think I might be buying enough to make a free-standing island and maybe put it on wheels so I can move it out of the way if I do have company over to sleep.
Here are the pictures. What do you think? Those of you who have craft rooms, what else do you think I could use or should have? The drawers are not all full so I do have room to grow (hehehe!).
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| This is from the door looking straight in toward the corner. |
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| Looking to the left. The stuff in front of the bookcase still needs a home. |
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| From the door looking more to the right. The paper cutter is on a temporary table. The other bookcase I want will go where the tote goes. |
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| The closet. LOL - it needs some work. The shelves are nice but too close together to do too much good. Once I get my island built, I think I'll take the picture boxes (the pink ones) and move them. Maybe. |
I probably did not need the work center because it doesn't really hold anything except overflow items (it's against the wall in the picture that shows the bookcase). Even at 40% off, it was kind of expensive. Michael's had all of their scrapbook storage items 40% off or I would not have been able to do this. Even so, I have about as much invested in the room as I would have if I'd bought one of the Sauder desks at OfficeMax or Office Depot. Our garage sale money paid for the whole room, which was nice - I've got no out-of-pocket expense.,
I have much more working area and storage space than one desk would have provided - and the desk would have been harder to move if the need to move would come up in the future. The cubes are screwed into the shelves and the shelves are anchored to the wall in a couple of places with L-brackets. They can be taken apart very easily and moved to a new location. The biggest "oops" we did was not allowing for electrical cords behind the shelves so my son-in-law is going to have to bring his hole cutting drill bit over and make a couple of holes for me so I can feed my cords through.
All in all, I'm very pleased. Once I get the walls decorated and maybe some shelving up, I'll consider it done. One more thing I need to figure out is how to store my punches. Right now, they're in the pink tote that you see in front of the bookcase. Someone else said they use a "shoe bag" that hangs over the door and others use towel bars to hang them from. I'm not sure I want to put towel bars up on the wall so I'll probably just keep them in the tote until I decide what will work best for me. I love my punches!
Time to get some projects started!!!
