Organizing Kids’ Craft Supplies

 

If you asked my girls what their favorite thing to do was, they would immediately answer “to draw and do crafts”. These girls of mine seemed to have inherited their momma & daddy’s creativity. They could easily sit at the kitchen table all day and draw or make crafts….and I have binders, boxes and drawers full of their drawings and crafts to prove it.

A couple of years ago, their craft supplies grew from crayons and coloring books to construction paper, scissors, glue sticks and stickers so I had to find a way to organize them but where they were also accessible to them. I came up with the idea to organize their craft supplies in a small cabinet on the outer side of our fridge enclosure. Since then, the craft supplies have outgrown that space and started spreading throughout the house. I had boxes of crafting materials in other closets and drawers as well as that small cabinet in the kitchen. It was driving me crazy to not have them all in one spot so I started brainstorming.

 

I still wanted the craft supplies easily accessible to the girls and close to the kitchen (They are not quite ready to craft unsupervised…I am constantly wiping marker and dried glue off the table and sometimes the floor!) . Then after discussing it with hubby, we agreed that the closet in the hallway that was housing our coats would be the best spot.

Before our rebuild, this closet housed our heating & air unit so it’s a good sized closet. Along with storing our coats, It’s also kind of our control center for all the techy stuff in the house.

Once we cleared out and purged our coats (we had way too many coats for living in a region that doesn’t get or stay really cold for very long), we started brainstorming about how to organize everything that would go into the closet. We decided to use our go-to cube shelves (affiliate) for the shelving. We measured the closet and decided that the 8 cube shelf would fit perfectly. Once we received the shelf and got it into the closet, I went shopping for something that would fit on the shelves.

In my search for storage, I went into Michaels and came across their Cre8ted Storage line at 70% off! I purchased 6 clear locker style storage bins (and a few other things not related to this project), and walked out for less than twenty dollars! These bins are no longer available online but you can purchase similar bins at the Dollar Tree. After I left Michael’s, my next stop was Target Dollar Spot. They didn’t have much in the dollar spot but I found a magazine/book bin to use for their blank paper (shown in title picture) and picked up some label pockets to label the bins. Then I went back to the storage section (there was a 20% off Cartwheel) and picked up some small boxes (shown in title picture) for their scissors, crayons, markers and colored pencils.

 

So now I’m going to give you a little tour of how the closet is organized. There are two built in shelves (not pictured) above the cube shelf unit. They hold the tech stuff for the house….our charging station for the Kindles & iPads, a monitor for our security cameras, etc. I do have 2 boxes on the very top shelf that have the girls large craft projects from school that won’t fit in a binder.

The top of the cube shelf are things the girls don’t really need access to like their road trip/traveling activities.

The binders are there for my easy access. I keep a binder for each girl of their very best drawings and a binder for their schoolwork. You can refer to this post for the schoolwork that I usually keep.

The basket to the left is for me. I needed a place to keep my Home Organization binder and my planner and since we had some free wall space, I went and bought a narrow hanging file basket at Hobby Lobby.

On the right you’ll notice a couple of daily routine charts. These are a work in progress and something I hope to have in my Etsy shop soon. I’ll have a post on that in the next couple of weeks.

For the bins, I sorted the supplies by type and made printed label inserts on simple white cardstock. I used address labels for the small boxes housing the markers, crayons etc.

 

 

When we were doing the rebuild, I had imagined this closet becoming something like a reading nook for the girls. For the longest time, we talked about putting an old bookshelf we have in there and putting all of the girls books on it. However, I really like how this closet has become somewhat of a command center. It’s right in the center of the house so it’s easy to access and has worked well for this purpose.