My craft “room”

 Well, it’s not really a room. There’s no real flooring, and zero drywall…but it works and I lurve it! I created this “space” a couple years ago, but recently have been making changes to make it function better and look cuter– as cute as cement walls and floors can get. ;)

The space started out like this a few years ago:

That would be a dumping zone. This is the first space as you walk down our basement steps, and because of that – everything just landed here. Well, most everything. It’s a big basement. :) Once this space was full, I would keep moving the piles around.

Last year, I added a folding table and shelving to hold wrapping and craft supplies and tools:

A few weeks ago, when I started the massive decrapification of the basement (AGAIN), I made a few adjustments – I have learned the way I had things placed down here contributes to the crapifying of the space every year.

The first change was to move a shelf that had most of my decor items from the back of the basement to this area – I found having in the back corner of the basement made it rare that I would actually walk back there and put the stuff away.

So I moved it to this area. Then I realized how much decor STUFF I actually had, and ended up buying another new shelf to hold more. I did a lot of thinking about where I wanted everything else as well, and moved it all around to function better.

Once I had everything in the right spot, this is what I was left with:

Schnikeys. Ummm…this was better than the before before! WAY. Even though I had put the table and shelves in this area a couple years ago, it didn’t prevent it from becoming a dump zone. The table actually encouraged it really.

But, after some rearranging, a whole lotta decluttering, and some fun additions, this is what it looks like today:

Ack!! Isn’t it precious? Yes, I know, as precious as cement can get?!

After I moved the shelves around, I thought hard about where I wanted to put everything on them. I realized a while back that the reason the table became such a pit was because the shelf with my tools was on the back wall – and that’s the one I use the most.

So when I was done with a project – done mentally and physically mind you – the last thing I wanted to do is put all the tools away! It was so much easier to throw them on the table. Because of this, I moved all of my tools to the first shelf as you walk down the stairs:

Brilliant. It’s the simple things folks. Do you know how many cans of spray paint were usually thrown on the “craft” table? Because I didn’t walk the extra ten feet? I know, it’s only ten feet. But mentally, when you’re pooped -- it’s miles.

The two shelves of extra decor are next. It will make such a difference having these so accessible! I used to trek around to a dark corner of the basement to put this stuff away, so it eventually, it just ended up in piles. I’m a piler, yes I am.

I didn’t really need two sets of shelves, but I was determined to sort the decor stuff and make it easy to find everything. I purged and still have this much left! A lot of this used to be in bins – things like candles, frames, to-do projects. Having it all out in the open is SO much better!

I moved the shelves with the wrapping and craft supplies to the back wall. My goal is to USE the table to wrap or craft – so now they are right there where I need them!:

Last year I came up with a way to store my wrapping paper, and it’s worked out GREAT! I drilled holes into the shelving and hung the paper rolls with twine:

Wrapping paper drives me nutty – all the unraveling, rolling, bouncing around. Argh! This has worked awesome! I love that they are out of the way and still allow for items on the shelf.

When I want to wrap something, I just hold it up, determine how much I need, then cut the paper. If the item is too large to hold up, it usually just goes in a bag.  :)

Once I felt like everything was in it’s place on the shelves, I moved on to the fun stuff. Whoohoo!

I decided a long time ago this spot would be as girly as it wants to be. I’m the only one who uses it, and even though I’m not what you would call a typical girly girl, I really wanted a space to just have fun with! Fun colors, fun prints, fun textures. This was the perfect spot!

The table is a simple folding table – and it is U.G.L.Y. on top. Last year I got some striped fabric and put it over the top with hot glue. This year, I wanted to amp up the fun and color a bit, so I went with this fabric instead:

Shut the front door…adorable. Aren’t the colors FUN? As you can see, I added the “skirt” with hot glue as well, so you can’t see these:

One is a bin I keep gifts in, one is a tool box for extra crap junk stuff.

The table cover fabric is from Hob Lob and was $6 a yard, 30 percent off. I only needed two yards. The fabric holds up surprisingly well! If I spray something like spray adhesive, or am painting, I just cover the table with scrap paper. (Usually the stuff they wrap my purchases with at Hob Lob!)

I literally hot glued it under the edges of the table. The skirt is leftover drapery lining and I glued that on too:

I wanted a cutting board for this table foreva, and decided to treat myself to one when I was done decluttering this space. It was $23 at Joann’s, 40 percent off:

Now I can craft, glue, cut, whatever, and not worry about the table. And it’s bright and happy! See the little green flower shaped thingy? It’s a silicon pot holder from Pier 1 – I got it for our kitchen, but realized today it would be the perfect little spot to rest my glue gun.

I tried it and by golly, it works!! (Yep, I sure did just say “by golly.”) The hot glue literally wipes right off of it. How stinking cute is that?

All the sudden I was finding the most adorable little accessories that worked with the colors:

The little clips ($1) and pencils ($2) were from Michaels – the pencils MATCH. Dying!!

Check out the eraser ($1):

I. am. dying.

Then I found this little pin cushion at Joann’s and couldn’t resist it:

Hmmm…maybe I am a girly girl?  ;)

The organization of this space was HUGE part of this project. The color and little extras were fun to add. But the biggest change in this area was the lighting. As you can see from the first couple pictures above, there was just a single light fixture for the whole “room.”

Because my hubby often works down here during the summer (more on that spot later), we decided to add more outlets in the basement. Since the electrician was going to be here anyway, I asked him to add another light fixture in my craft area, and then a third light so I could swag a little fixture over the table.

I found a little brass beauty at the local ReStore last summer – it was spray painted and waiting in our garage all this time:

Let there be light!! It makes SUCH a difference to this area! It’s so bright and fun and now I can see what I’m doing when I work. Whoohoo!

I bought a glass lamp from Goodwill last summer as well. I took it apart and spray painted just the brassy parts with the same fun green:

The $4 lamp shade was dressed up with a strip of extra fabric and some hot glue.

Can I get a “CAAUUUUUTE?!” Say it with me Squeezies!

My husband walked downstairs tonight and when he got down there, yelled up the stairs to me -- “Honey! It looks so cute down here! I love it!”

And that is why I love him. :)

The before shot that was really the half way shot, that’s how bad it was:

And my girly, bright after:

So worth all that work. I’ve got a few spring project I’ll be working on down here this week –- if they work out I’ll show you soon. Heck, I’ll show you even if they don’t.  ;)

 

Thank you to my sponsor:

Almost time to shop!

Hello all! Oh my, I was SO GLAD to read your responses to my last post. That’s why I love this big bloggy world – so many of us with the same messy houses who experience the same things and can share and vent about them.

I am happy to announce I am blogging tonight from my pretty much, almost there, decluttered basement. It’s a bit chilly down here tonight, but I couldn’t resist. ;) The electrician is coming tomorrow to do a few things, and I hope to get some fun stuff done this weekend. I will do my best to show you the transformation next week! (Check out this post from last year. Just imagine the “after” much more like the “before” – again.)

I have a great giveaway planned for tomorrow, so tonight I wanted to take the chance to remind you about the upcoming Goodwill Shop & Hop.

It’s only nine days away, so if you are interested in joining us, let us know soon! Miss Beckie from Infarrantly Creative and I are planning to hop around to five Indianapolis area Goodwill locations on Saturday, March 13. We would luuurve if you could join us!

We have a few surprises for those lovely ladies joining us -- each shopper will receive a “swag bag” stuffed with over $100 worth of merchandise courtesy of:

Eclectic Cabinet Knobs and Decor

Woohoo! It’s going to be so much fun! For more info, go here. I’ll be back this weekend!

 

Oh yeah, and check out Mariel and Jessica's fantastic blog, Or so she says -- I guest posted there today! The post is about one my most recent Goodwill transformations -- my lovely $10 coffee table. Some of you may have seen already, but it's worth checking out again. :)

 

 

This post sponsored by:

In real life

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been just a teensy weensy obsessed with the decrapification of our basement. Usually I wait to attack that space every year after I’ve decluttered every room in the house, but I just could NOT even stand it anymore.

It was making me just sick every time I walked down there…really. The amount of crap was overwhelming. So a couple weeks ago I started the biggest decluttering project of my life.

This year I am determined to get rid of items we don’t need anymore. Most of those items are at least on shelves or packed away in bins, but I am feeling a desperate need to get the crap out.

I want to simplify…breathe…

But if you looked at the other two floors of our house you’d wonder why in the heck this woman does not clean her house.

If you’ve read this blog for awhile, you know I’m not afraid to show you the little messes around our home. But when I’m taking pictures for a decorating post, I try to keep the clutter to a minimum – for all of our sakes. ;)

What you don’t know is often I will simply shove the mess out of the way with my foot to prepare for a good shot. I am also known to chuck a couple (or 15) toys across the room before a picture.

Today, my basement is looking fanfreakingtastic. I have put all my “housekeeping” mojo towards it for the past couple weeks. But the rest of our house…ummmmmm…

This gorgeous view of our dining room:

Has been littered with door knob parts for a week (or has it been two?):

The balls and the basketball hoop are constants in here anyway, but the busted plastic shelving unit from Walmart is just the icing. ;) Those beautiful oil rubbed bronze knobs would have been installed the day they arrived if I hadn’t hit a little snag with them. (More on that later.) For now, they sit exactly where I left them that day – screws and all. Argh.

Yesterday, the foyer to our house looked like this:

Seriously, who needs to work out when they can take 852 trips up and down the basement steps in a week? Seriously.

Our family room cabinet redo looks like this at it’s best:

But lately it’s become what any flat space becomes – a landing zone for just about anything:

Complete with the DVD door left open by a little munchkin. ;)

This next one is just laughable anyway. I mean, are you kidding me? Our playroom looks like this about five days out of the year:

Two of those days were days I took pictures for a blog post. The other three were for parties. Ha! You think I’m kidding.

Most days, it’s thoroughly trashed. But today, there’s an extra special touch:

 

A half nekked window from when I took the muslin drapes downstairs to see if I liked the light drapes in the family room against the tan walls and sooooo didn’t (ick, they were so blah) and they laid on the couch for a week and I’m lucky they are even back upstairs today…whew.

Anymore the view into our bedroom NEVER looks like this:

First of all, it’s become the second playroom, which is truly fantastic. Especially in the middle of the night when one of us either cries out in pain from an itty bitty teeny tiny toy in the foot, or said foot hits a toy that starts woo wooing or reeeer reeeering or whatever.

 

But even better lately – the beautiful fireplace has been covered with crap that needs to go down to the basement:

 

Did I mention I decluttered this room three weeks ago? Hmmm? Three weeks this stuff has been sitting there. THREE.

And my favorite. The view to our room on days we have people over, cause that’s the ONLY days I make the bed:

Today, the bed isn’t made, but that’s not unusual. What’s extra fun is the toilet seat sitting in our lovely, relaxing bedroom:

Oh yeah baby. A booty seat. A seat for the tush. The throne. Whatever you like to call it. It’s on my bedroom floor.

So you see, it’s not perfect around here. It’s not usually quite this bad either. ;) But even at it’s worse, it’s HOME and we LOVE it.

Once I show you the basement, you’ll understand why living like this has been worth it. At least that’s what I keep telling myself. Over and over. Every time I step on a toy.

I’m off to install a toilet seat. Oh, who am I kidding? I’m off to declutter the basement some more.

Please be kind Squeezies. Kisses.

 

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The stair redo how-to

I know it took me forever to get this post up, but I’m finally going to share the rest of the steps it took to get the stairs to where they are now – that would be GORG. ;)

This process took a while, but the planning before that took a good year – I took my time deciding what to do. I figured they would look fantastic, I just wanted to make sure they would be safe. I did a lot of research over the year, including digging up some old photos of our house during the building process. (As you can see above.)

I wanted to make sure I didn’t dream up the beautiful wood steps with the rounded edges:

I didn’t. Yay!

Next step was getting up the nerve to rip up the carpet. I told you how I started this process here. When the carpet was up, I was left with this:

Many of you have asked if I did anything to the steps – put any wood on them, etc. The steps were just as you see them here when I pulled up the carpet. We were lucky to have the rounded edges. If I hadn’t remembered those edges from when we built the house, I probably wouldn’t have attempted this project.

I hear you can purchase wood treads at places like Lowe’s and Home Depot and install them over rough wood.

You can see (above) where I started to work at the overspray on the steps with my little handheld sander:

I used a 50 grit paper and it really was knocking it down – it was just going to take forever and a day. Enter my wonderful father-in-law and his assistant and their fab, much more powerful than my little mouse, sander. It took them a couple hours of sanding, but it did a fantastic job.

This part was the hardest for me though – sawdust was EVERYWHERE. I found it in odd places for a while:

I am still finding it places.

I actually had started priming some of the risers (the parts that go up) before they finished sanding. If I could do it again, I wouldn’t have primed anything until it was all prepped and ready.

My next step was to start the staining. I already had some stain from a previous project. It didn’t work for that, but it was perfect for our stairs! It’s Minwax Bombay Mahogany in gloss:

(The pic above is of the satin finish.) This type of stain is a polyshade – which means the poly is mixed in already. Although after living with the stairs for a while now, I think I will go ahead and do a coat of poly over them anyway, to add a bit more of a glossy sheen. (I found a product that you can add over it to make it slip-proof, so I’ll let you know how that goes.)

To stain, I used painters tape and taped off the treads and went over and over them a few times to make sure there was a good seal:

You can see why I wouldn’t recommend priming or painting first – the stain got on some of the risers as I worked. Stain is easier to cover with primer and paint than paint is to cover with stain. :)

At the edge of each step, I tore off little pieces of the tape to go around each tread:

I did two coats on each of the stairs. I did most of the staircase every other step with each coat – this way you can still get up and down the steps. Although going down every other step is really quite a pain – I don’t recommend it. :)

I would do it at the end of the night so you don’t have to go up or down at all. The stain takes about six hours to completely dry – or at least that’s how long it says you need to wait between coats. I used a fan a lot to speed up the process so we could walk on them faster. :)

I figured out how we would get up and down the steps, but I didn’t factor in the three fat cats that live in this house. Uhhh…it hit me about five minutes into the first step that they were going to step on them. The fan helped deter them a bit, but I did find these on the landing one night:

Isn’t that the cutest little paw print ever? You could actually see where the stain wore right off the paw as it went across the landing though, so by the time they got to the other side, the stain was gone. Thank goodness. :)

Once the two coats were dry, I continued on the other risers with the primer and paint. I taped off the steps with paper so there was no chance I would get paint on them:

As I mentioned – it’s a whole lot harder to get paint off stain than to cover stain with paint. Like, I would cry, harder. :) I did two coats of primer, one coat of glossy white on each riser.

At the top step, I just left the carpet around the top step – not sure if I will keep it like that or not. I don’t mind it, but I may pull it up to see what the edge of the flooring looks like there. If it’s rounded off, I may cut the carpet and use a transition piece:

I am trying to avoid any kind of tripping hazard at all costs though, so for now the carpet is fine.

Some of the white paint did bleed through on the stain just a bit, and although it wasn’t bad at all, I wanted to try to fix it. I was surprised to find I could just use a razor to scrape it off – lightly of course. It worked like charm!

If you decide to do this, there are a few things to think about. I kept hearing mixed results from those that filled their holes with stainable putty. I had heard the putty doesn’t always take the stain well. So…I just left the holes as is!:

You have to look to see them, and I was sure to soak each hole with stain so you couldn’t see bare wood at all. I’m SO glad I didn’t fill these. The holes give it character, at least that’s what I say!

On the landing, I sanded down one of the planks with my little mouse sander a bit, and wish I hadn’t:

Sometimes my sander does this and it drives me mad. For now, you don’t really notice it, so I’m not going to worry about it. I may try sanding it down more in the future and restaining. I didn’t sand the other planks at all and they turned out great!

So let’s break it down, shall we? My total cost for the project was less than $30. YEP. Thirty buckaroos.

I had the stain. I had the primer and glossy white paint. I had the paper to tape off the steps.

I purchased two packages of the plank flooring for $10 each and didn’t even use all of it. I bought two packages of foam brushes to apply the stain, and those were about $5. I also bought more painter’s tape.

That’s it!

Other than the majority of the sanding, and the laying of the planks on the landing (which is installed just like beadboard, so I could have done it --- but it was nice to have help!), I did the whole project myself, start to finish.

Because I had help, I was at the mercy of their schedules a bit. It felt like it took months for this to get completed, but it was really only a few weeks! If I had done the whole thing myself, it would have been a week or two, but that’s only because I’m completely nuts impatient.

And this was the result:

You can see more pictures here!

Once I get the molding done on the walls I’ll be sure to share updated pictures! I hope this helps those of you who are thinking about trying it out! Be sure to read my first post about it here if you are curious about what’s under your carpeted steps.

If I didn’t answer one of your questions, leave it in the comments and I’ll answer you there.

Make sure to check out the Before and After Party links below! The party will be open to links till this Friday.

Thank you to my sponsor for this post!: