Craft Room Troubles...

So for 2 years now (I know, I know!), Carl and I have lived at home with my parents while we save money for children/future house plans. We live in the basement "apartment" of a house my grandparents built in the '80s and for the most part, it's absolutely amazing. We have a kitchenette, a master bedroom, a bathroom, a living room space, and storage. We also happen to have a massively big area that we were just using for storage (which was quite inconvenient because you have to walk through it to get to our living room). Now, I have so much art/craft stuff it's quite sad really, but I've never had a place to store it or a place to sew or crochet of my own. So Carl finally convinced me he was completely fine with me having free reign in this space.

I've spent the better part of a month now trudging along trying to clean out things we didn't need and donating furniture/items that were useless to us now. It's getting very close to being exactly the way I want it, but I discovered a problem about a week ago. I happen to have two fuzzy kitties that live in our apartment and one of them is quite the thief. He steals almost everything of mine that's in sight and either plays with it or just hides from me for his own amusement.

I used to have this cheap bookshelf that I kept all of my fabric on and it was working for the moment until I could find a better solution but my kitty finally forced my hand this week. He would pull out every piece of fabric and drag it up and down our house, and some of that stuff isn't cheap cotton! So I explored my local thrift stores and antique shops for a cute solution on a budget, but I was coming up short and getting quite discouraged. I came home and was pouting a little when I realized: I live in a house built by grandparents and surely there would be treasure somewhere that would work for what I needed.

After about an hour of searching and deciding nothing in the house would work, I remembered our back garage. Oh, it's a treasure trove of stuff waiting to be donated, or just shoved out of the way because we simply could not find room for it in the house (mind you, this is exactly how I found my craft table). I started my search and quickly located an amazing metal cabinet used to store nails of all things (not sure why...).


(Please ignore my giant mess and my lovely kitten who would not leave this cabinet alone while I was photographing it!)

I cleaned that baby up and now it has a wonderful home in my craft space, and works wonderfully for what I needed: a simple cheap solution to store fabric in a semi organized way. I also located a wonderful chest of drawers to complete my craft table, but that project will get completed next weekend (hopefully).

But before I leave, here's my favorite part of my cabinet, the latch:



But another item crossed off my list is always a good thing!