Craft room reveal!

Here at last are some photos of my craft room in its nearly finished state! There are still a few little projects to finish off, but it’s nearly there!

You’ll see from the before photos that the room was very purple! I really did love the colour, one of the first room ideas I had when buying my house was that I wanted a purple craft room. But, more than 15 years on, I decided that I’d like a more neutral look for the room. This was mainly because it would make it easier to display some of my finished craft items around the room without clashing with the walls, but it also had the added effect of making the room feel much lighter and brighter!

The first step was to have a massive clearout of the room! I filled quite a few bin bags, and also made a trip to the tip. Then I needed to remove some of the furniture from the room, which wasn’t easy as there isn’t much space to put it in the bedroom. I realised that even after my clearout there was a huge amount of stuff left! I ended up pushing most of the furniture to one end of the room while I painted the opposite end, and then doing the same for the other end of the room.

I painted the two longer walls and the ceiling brilliant white (the ceiling was a real pain to do, because it’s polystyrene tiles), and the two shorter walls were painted with Dulux Perfectly Taupe, which is a lovely greyish beige that seems to change colour at different times of day between grey, beige and almost lilac – I love it!

 

After painting one of the white walls, I marked out an area I wanted to paint with blackboard paint. The blackboard paint was a little difficult to work with as it was so runny on the brush that it spattered a lot, but when it was on the wall it was surprisingly difficult to spread about! But I was hugely impressed with the effect, especially after I’d rubbed it with chalk, and if I didn’t love the Perfectly Taupe so much I’d paint a whole wall with it! I also used it to paint the fronts of some Ikea drawers.

I painted the shelving units brilliant white, including the cutlery racks and small shelves I use for my rubber stamps, and decorated a set of plastic drawers with patterned papers. One of my favourite projects was decorating a drawer unit with papers in Japanese designs.

I got a small white lampshade from Ikea, and a retro style clock from Asda. I’ve also done some fun little projects like spray painting a letter rack, and decorating a green pot with washi tape and ribbon for my scissors. I made a couple of little curtains to hide clutter under some of the desks, and it was a good chance to get all the cables for my computer tidied up too!

I don’t really need a lot of privacy in the room, so I took down the vertical blinds and the curtains. This immediately made the room much lighter and brighter, and makes it much easier to take photos there. I do sometimes need a little shade from the sun while using the computer, so I replaced the heavy curtain pole with the thinnest one I could find, and attached some thin voile curtains using clips (but this was after I took the photos). And now that the blinds are out of the way I can use the windowsill (which I stained a darker colour) for displaying some odds and ends like the big pincushion my mum got me recently.

I’m really enjoying having areas to display and photograph my craft projects, and a light, bright craft room to work in!