Our New Art Room!!

Okay, I'm going to warn you right off the bat. This post will be long and have a ton of photos. :-) I am soooo excited to announce that we now have a full-fledged art room in our house! Seriously, this is a dream come true and I never would have thought I would have anything so cool in my house EVER. And I will completely say my kids are SPOILED! ;-) I would have LOVED to have something like this available to me 24/7 when I was a kid, who wouldn't?!
OUR NEW ART ROOM.

The FINAL final photo of the art room with wall decals and all. You can see the bookshelves that were originally against the wall are now on the wall outside our master bedroom.

The wall decals I ordered from Amazon. LOVE them!

Before as my office and after as the almost finished art room (just waiting on the chair mat and wall decals to arrive).

Now, how did this come about? Sort of on a whim actually. I've been slowly trying to gain the upper hand on the clutter around our house. We've been here going on 6 years now and it just seems to collect. We had a garage sale last year and that sort of helped clean things out. But I still feel like we have monumental levels of stuff in our house. EVERYWHERE. One day, as I was searching and searching for this pack of glitter that I knew I had somewhere...it dawned on me that we have art supplies in about 8 different places in our house, and it was frustrating, and I could never find anything when I wanted to, and we have this loft at the top of our stairs that is a library/office for me that I never use, and yes, I know that is a huge run on sentence. I searched Pinterest for "craft organization" to get some ideas of what to do with all our stuff everywhere.

We had craft stuff stored under the desk in the kitchen, in kitchen cupboards, in each of my girls' rooms, on a little shelf in the loft, and a random card table in the master bedroom.

I drooled over all the lovely craft rooms I saw on Pinterest and Google Images; dreaming that it would be so nice if we had an extra room in our house for something like that, when I thought of the loft again! I hadn't really used it as my office for about a year. It was really just dead space that the girls ended up playing in only when they had friends over. Why not turn it into a craft room?! We already had a desktop in our storage room I could use for a craft table. If I rearranged our bookshelves, I might be able to make them work and we had a wardrobe in the basement I could use for sewing storage. All I would really need to buy were some chairs and something to help cover the carpeted floor.

Well.....you know how home renovations go. Once you start, things don't work out like you thought or end up costing more than you thought, etc. Once I started voicing my ideas to my husband, we decided the wardrobe was just too big and wasn't going to work. And maybe I didn't have enough existing shelving after all.....etc, etc, etc. My husband actually brought up all of this and suggested we switch things around and buy a couple more IKEA shelves. And voila, after spending about three times more than I was expecting to spend (and with many reminders to my husband that I was the one who was trying to do it for cheap), we have our extremely beautiful and very cool art room! My husband is so sweet, he said he just wanted to make it perfect for me and the kids. :-)

Here it is in all its glory:

Tall shelves on either side of the art table. I had all of the supplies you see here already in the house, except for the tall bottles of paint and the gallon jug of clear glue.

The tabletop with added shelf storage underneath on one end and fun colorful chairs from IKEA. Also an office chair mat to help protect the floor and make it easier to sweep up glitter and scraps. I also have thin plastic cutting boards from IKEA to help protect the tabletop.

These are the supplies the girls know they can use anytime.

Almost all the containers you see in these photos cost between 25 cents each and $2.50, bought in multi-packs at Dollar Tree, the dollar section at Target, or super cheap at IKEA.

My goal was to make the room as bright and cheery as I could using the girls' favorite colors of blue, lime green, pink and purple.

Isn't that a neat way to store floss?! I completely stole that from a post on Pinterest. It's so easy for the girls to cut a piece off and not get it all tangled up. And it's cute besides. :-)

The middle section between the shelves houses "Mommy's supplies" other than some of the metal magnetic containers (the girls know which ones) and the scissors. There are paints, permanent markers and watercolor pencils. All things I want to stay in good condition and have on hand for our summer art history projects. I wanted all of these in one area so it would be easy for the girls to distinguish them from all the other things they (and their friends) can use anytime. The peg board has very special meaning as it was my husband's grandfather's workbench pegboard. My husband inherited it when his grandpa passed away and it's been sitting waiting for us to use it for a couple years. I had actually forgotten we had this and bought rods from IKEA to hang the paint baskets on. Then, he remembered we had the pegboard and it fit everything just perfectly. We absolutely love that we have a little of Grandpa Milt hanging up in our house. And it's amazing, you can tell he made the pegboard by drilling all the holes himself! Our guess is that it's at least 50 years old.

These IKEA canisters are magnetic and stick to the bars attached to the wall. VERY COOL!

The lower half of each shelf will have doors on them eventually and house all my various sewing supplies (fabric scraps, projects, embroidery floss, sewing notions, and even my sewing machine fits! It's never had a real home before always being moved from one storage room to a closet to the next. I also love that I now have a great table I can use the sewing machine on (the one or two times a year that it gets used). I've used the kitchen table, a card table, our bedroom vanity...

And finally a photo of the kids in the art room's inaugural use. They couldn't wait to get started before it was completely done so this was before we had the chair mat, wall decals, etc.