Craft Room progress report

Warning - this post contains about a million pictures!

This past weekend I finally got some quality time at home, the last such weekend for about a month. I used the time to make progress on my craft room reorganization.

On Satruday morning, after a quick run to Cherry Hill to pick up the last piece of my shelving system from the container store, I got to work making the craft room ready. I moved bookcases, crates, filing cabinets, etc. A bunch of things took up temporary residence in the hallway.



By early afternoon, the future shelving area was clear and ready for what I thought would be the simple job of hanging the single track that all of the shelving hangs from. Silly me...



Because I don't have a lot of experience hanging things that need to be really level unsupervised. I asked a friend to come and help me with that bit. While I waited for his arrival, I put together the drawer frames. One of the beauties of this Elfa system is that it goes together easily. What I like even more though is that the instuctions included with each component are very explicit and easy to follow.



Well, the drawere frames were the easy part of the day... I chose to hang the shelves on an outer wall of my house. No problem, said the nice lady from the Container Store who sold me the screws and anchors for plaster walls (which seemed really strong and sturdy). Problem. The screws are 3". The gap between the plaster and the outside brick is about 2". So, off we went to the hardware store to find shorter screws. Then we couldn't get the fancy anchors all the way in. So we tried different anchors I had in the house. Almost, but now they're not as happy or secure with the screws. We try a few more things. In the end, I made a second trip to Cherry Hill and purchased the screws and anchors meant for dry wall. They're still as strong, but shorter, and therefore, perfect. By about 10:30pm, the top track was up!

I had this notion that I would go to bed as soon as the top track was up, but no, not possible. I started putting up the brackets...

...and the shelves. I liked this spacing, but discovered I didn't leave enough room for the drawer units to fit below. I waited until Sunday to reconfigure.

I spent quality time on the ladder Sunday morning working on shelf spacing. This is what I settled on.

Next, I completed the drawer units and put them in place. As an added bonus, the drawer legs fit neatly over the radiator pipe and don't interfere with the phone jack that's near the floor.

Almost immediately I began filling the drawers. It's so great to have the space to be organized!!!

By the time I stopped working on it tonight, the upper shelves were filled with my fabric (greatly in need of sorting and perhaps storage in bins), and most of the drawers were filled. Imagine, I have a drawer full of nothing else but ribbon! I took advantage of one of the extra shelf brackets to hang ebroidery hoops from (where did I get that many hoops?)

Over the next many days, I hope to keep working on this. Even if I only unpack a few things at a time, that will be enough to keep the momentum going. Stay tuned for more posts as the sorting/rediscovery of stuff I'd forgotten about process continues!