Every month, one of the Design Team members for My Creative Scrapbook conducts a scraproom tour, and this month it's my turn! I would love to tell you that my scraproom (and especially my husband's side of "the office" - I'm not supposed to call it "my scraproom as it's a shared space and that isn't very manly LOL) always looks this neat and tidy, but truth be told, it took me several days of cleaning, organizing and decluttering to get it to look like this (and if you could see under my husband's desk, you'd see I just piled a lot of his stuff on the floor!). I'll try to keep it looking this way, but truth be told, by the time this post goes live, every flat surface will likely be piled with scrappy goodies again. I'm not a clean scrapper, and I tend to take out everything I think I might need for a project so that I have it close at hand.
Our office is located in the basement of our home, just off the entryway. It thankfully has its own door, so I can close that if it's a mess and we're having company over, or leave it open for people to admire my work. Here's the view from the doorway:
Fair warning, this tour might look like an IKEA advert; we did a major renovation of our upstairs 5 years ago, and though furnishing the scraproom was a priority for me once we were done, Ikea was what was within our budget. And it has worked out well for us.
We set up the room so that we can spend time together (though I have to admit, I have more fun in there, as I'm usually scrapbooking; hubby enjoys it less when he's paying the bills). I tend to work best when I have the TV on (even now as I blog I have a documentary on in the background), and the TV makes the room more inviting for hubby to come spend time with me.
My favourite feature of my scraproom is all the space to display my work. I think it's a pity to put so much work into something only to hide it away in an album (and besides that, my current scrappy style doesn't fit in albums!). My husband hung some curtain wire from Ikea (which can be found here) to the right of my desk, from which I can hang 14 of my current favourite layouts on display (using these curtain clips; Clip-It-Up clips also work well). It has worked out so well that he says he regrets that he didn't string it across the entire wall instead of just over my side.
As it is, though, it all works out; we use the blank wall beside his desk to hang some of the kids' favourite art projects. As you can see, I also have canvases and altered frames arrayed along the windowsill; every available space is filled.
Here's the view toward my desk from his. As you can see, I pack a lot into the space I have. Organization is the key - everything has a place, most of it within easy reach (I'm lazy that way!). For the most part I manage to keep to my side, though you may notice that my two-tier Clip-It Up has intruded onto the corner of his desk.
I love my desk, also courtesy of Ikea. Regrettably, they have retired my tabletop, which is a real loss - it is two tiered, with a glass top over a wood base. The glass top is perfect: I can spray, paint, cut and heat set embossing powder directly on my tabletop without worrying about ruining the table top (I previously melted an indent into a plastic table - eek!). Although you can see dried paint on the tabletop in the photo below, it does come off easily when scraped with a gift card.
You can see the space between the tabletops in the picture below. I can tuck supplies I plan on using for my project, my laptop, remote controls, or anything I don't want to get messy under the glass while I work, providing extra space and keeping things safe. (You can also see the space heater tucked under my desk - it gets chilly down here in the winter!)
The legs for the table are also from Ikea (they are the Alex drawers).
I wanted a really big L-shaped desk to maximize my workspace. I used two Micke desks, you guessed it, from Ikea, set end-to-end to create the desk along the wall (see the desks to the right on the picture above).
As I mentioned earlier, I like to have everything within easy reach. I store supplies I like to have quickly to hand in the drawers under the main desktop.
To the right of me:
Drawer 1: Pastes, Gels, inks, foils, mica powders.
Drawer 2: Adhesives.
Drawer 3: Assorted tools (and lots of wet wipes!).
Drawer 4: cutting mats, gauze, extension cords.
Drawer 5: Stamps!
To the left of me:
Drawer 1: My general (non-scrappy) junk drawer.
Drawer 2: Embossing powders and enamels, glitters, flock, beads. (Tip: Notice the embossing powders in the centre; to get an accurate impression of how the EP looks once heated, I punched circles, applied embossing ink, heat embossed them and adhered them to each bottle - no more guesswork!).
Drawer 3: Inking supplies, pens, washi tapes. (Tip: to the left of the photo are empty matchboxes that I use to store my blending foams. Each is labeled with the name of the Distress Ink it corresponds with).
Drawer 5: Ephemera, glass pebbles, and lots of metal embellishments.
Under the desk along the wall are cupboards (intended for a computer tower).
Cupboard 1: Dry embossing supplies (dies, cutting plates), embroidery floss and a spray bottle for water when painting with acrylics.
Cupboard 2: Liquid adhesives, pencil case with coloured pencils and markers for travelling, Bind-It-All, drywall tape, foil tape, edge distresser, Wishblade.
There are three accessible drawers above these (the fourth is obscured by the main desk, but it houses all the manuals and extra hardware pieces in case we ever need to take it all apart).
The larger drawer contains painting supplies, Gelatos and pastels.
The two smaller drawers contain printed photos I may want to scrapbook on the left, and images for colouring and specialty papers on the right. (Tip: To be able to do something crafty when traveling, I stamp images on watercolour and marker paper and keep them in folders in this drawer; when I'm packing up I can just grab a folder of uncoloured images and my pencil case and be on my way.)
Beneath this desk I keep my recycling box (after all, scrapbooking creates tons of recyclable waste!), mending basket, chipboard for traveling (I love chipboard; the black plastic box under the mending is packed full of it), and an old pizza-style shipping box I use for misting in to contain the over-spray.
Here's the rest of the wall unit. I have interesting wine bottles and bottles I may want to alter on top. My Prima Chalk Edgers are stuck onto the side with velcro dots, making it easy to see what colour I'm grabbing, and easy to put away neatly.
I love looking at the rainbow above this portion of my desk. Here I keep most of my sprays (I have a bit of a spray addiction), sitting on top of a rail from Ikea which is designed to hold little pots, which I use to hold laces and trims (which long ago stopped having any semblance of order), alcohol markers, paintbrushes and palette knives and scissors and cutting tools - all within easy seated reach.
An Ikea Raskog cart stores my small/textural background stamps in a basket hung on the side).
On the top shelf, I store Prima embellishments I want to have close to hand to riffle through.
On the second shelf I store big stamps I want to be able to riffle through - Bloom Girls, Julie Nutting, and Santoro, as well as boxes of Prima flowers.
On top of my desk I have two Clip-It Ups. The smaller one contains Prima flowers (who can ever get enough flowers?) while the larger one contains an assortment of flowers from other manufacturers and embellishments.
I store my completed layouts in soft-sided bins that are designed to fit into the Expedit. All four are crammed to bursting, so I'm going to need to come up with another solution soon, but considering they hold about 6 years of layouts I'm pretty happy!
In the top left cubby, I have two K-cup storage units from Costco (designed to hold the little Keurig coffee thingies). I flipped the sliding drawers upside down and made a base out of chipboard, and use them for storing more paint. My Big Shot fits nicely out of the way on top.
Jackie
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