I love to get a glimpse inside of other people’s homes.  If you leave your curtains open at night and a light on, I am totally that person who drives slowly past your house to see what kind of decor you have.  Not in a creepy way of course!  Don’t judge, you know you do it to {wink}!

I have found myself really drawn to peoples work spaces lately, whether that be a home office, kitchen work space or a full on craft room.  Since I have loved seeing so many of your crafty spaces, I thought it was fine time that I share my own!  Now my craft studio is nothing glamorous (or even photo worthy, really) but I love it.  It is a quiet space where I can create, be myself, and get lost in glitter and buttons for hours.  It is also the workhorse of my business.  All of the Freckles Crafts are created, packaged, and shipped from this studio, and it is one of the hardest working rooms in the house!  So grab a cup of tea and enjoy the tour!

When we purchased this house five years ago this room was a blank slate.  Just a shell of a room with bare concrete walls, and unfinished ceiling, and no cabinets.

Pretty huh?  But I had a vision and this room is what sold me on the purchase of this home. It was just off of a finished room in our basement, which I knew would become my kids playroom, and the perfect location for a craft room.

After a lot of work (and patience) here is what it looks like today!

Pretty cute huh?  I am love with how it turned out!

So here is how I transformed this room.  This transformation did not happen overnight and It was a process that took several years to complete.

I was fortunate enough to score a bunch of cabinets for free when we remodeled our kitchen.  The cabinets were in really bad shape.  Original to the house, 1970′s, dark brown with a glossy shellac on them (as you can see in the photo I took above on the day our realtor showed us this house).  The cabinets were not really my taste, but more importantly many of the drawers and cabinets were broken and they just were not functional for a kitchen.  So when we remodeled this space I got rid of the unusable cabinets, and had my contractor install the old cabinets down to the basement.  SCORE!!!  Then I went to Lowe’s and purchased stock counter tops for super cheap and my nice contractor installed them for me.  This was the beginning of my craft studio.  The space was definitely functional at this point, but not that nice to work in.  The walls were cold concrete, the ceiling was unfinished, and the floor was cracked boring concrete (I wish I had a photo of what the space looked like but for some reason I never took one).  Needless to say the space was not one that I wanted to linger in for very long and not much crafting took place there.  Unfortunately it had to stay that way for a while until it was in the budget to make it pretty.  Fast forward two years and that day finally came!

We were having some other work done on the house, and again another contractor gave us a great deal to add on the work in my craft studio.  It pays to negotiate my friends!  You would be surprised at what kind of deals you can score.  He sanded and painted all of the cabinets (a job that I did not want to tackle).  I also had him paint the concrete walls Freckles Green, and we installed a drop ceiling while leaving the existing fluorescent lights in place to save money.  I don’t really like the fluorescent lights because they make this weird buzzing noise, and don’t provide great lighting for photos (as is evident in the pictures below), however we saved a bundle of money and they work fine for the purpose of this space.  You can also see in some of the photos we had to work around existing pipes and wiring.  In this case we left them exposed and either painted them or tried to cover them in another way.  Not perfect, but again fine for the purpose of this space and great for the budget!  We also resurfaced the concrete floor with a product that is typically intended for the garage.  It is super durable, cleans easily, and makes the floor of my craft room a really pretty blue color, BONUS!

One thing I love about this space is all of the storage I have.  I have enough room for each major department of my business; product development, inventory, and shipping.  Here is a closer look into how I work.

I have a sturdy work table, which actually used to be our kitchen table when my hubby and I first got married 13 years ago!  Something to be said about products made in the good ol’ USA!.  All these years later it is still in perfect condition, and works great in this space.  I usually have only one chair at the table, but I have extras I can pull out when the kids want to work with me or use this space for crafting.  To warm up this work space I added an old rug under the table.  It doesn’t match the rest of the decor, however, I haven’t felt like forking over the money for a new rug that will end up with paint, glue, and other gunk on it!  On my work table I keep a wire basket to hold all of the materials for the craft project I am currently working on.

Just behind my work space is my inventory area.  I purchased two storage units from IKEA and use simple cardboard file boxes to store my craft kits.  Not very high tech but they fit both sizes of craft kits perfectly and hold a lot of inventory at one time.  The best, and most cost effective solution I have found thus far!  I label each box with a super fancy black sharpie marker.  Again more functional, than beautiful, but it works for me, ha!

I had this awkward wall space where we could not hang cabinets because of the existing pipes.  To fill this space I created this inspiration board with an old cardboard box and some fabric from IKEA.  I love how it turned out.  In fact I love it so much I can’t bear to hang anything on it and therefore it now just functions as a pretty piece of art!

I use all kind of containers for storage.  Nothing is off limits especially if it is free.  I use Mason jars to hold pom poms, clothes pins, large buttons, fabric scraps, etc.   Recycled glass jars hold buttons, google eyes, and other small craft items.  I also have a small collection of blue vintage glass jars that hold miscellaneous craft items but mostly just serve as a decoration.

When packaging crafts I need to have supplies within easy reach. These are upcycled metal buckets I found at Goodwill.  I added ribbon to each bucket and tied them to a metal towel rack from IKEA that is mounted to the underside of my cabinets.

Here is a closeup.

Underneath my inspiration board there is another space where we could not install cabinets due to some pesky pipes.  I found the perfect solution by filling this space with three rolling carts that I use to house card stock, felt, vinyl, and small craft parts used for my craft kits.  I have considered adding a pretty curtain on a tension rod to hide the rolling carts but didn’t want to have to deal with pushing it aside every time I needed to access this area.  Have you noticed a theme here?  I am all about function in this room!  A pretty space is great but if it is a hassle to work in then who cares, right?

On this end of my craft room I upcycled a hutch from an old computer desk.  I flipped it upside down (my sister’s genius idea!) and placed a peg board behind it to create an area to contain the paint for my craft kits, glue dots, tape, craft directions, scissors, paper cutters, rulers, etc.

On top of my counters I always keep my Cricut, a small TV to watch while I craft, postal scale, and large paper cutter.  Inside the cabinets you will find pretty much everything else; packaging materials, more craft supplies, and an overflow of small parts that are packaged and ready to go into craft kits.

So that is about it!  I hope you enjoyed the tour.  Here is one last look! And one more for good measure!

 Thanks for visiting!