Ideas for Organizing Kids' Craft Supplies in a Small Space

When we were building our house and planning our cabinet layout, I really wanted an enclosure for our refrigerator with a cabinet on one side. There wasn’t a lot of room for a deep cabinet but I thought surely I could use it for something. I mean, there’s no such thing as too much storage, right?

So let’s fast forward to when they brought in the cabinets. My thinking was that it would be deep enough to keep my cookbooks but when I opened the doors I realized that there was no way cookbooks were going to fit. The depth of the shelves were at most, six inches. What in the world was I going to use this cabinet for? (Side note, I also asked for shelves on either end of my island for cookbooks and they ended up being the same depth as this cabinet.)

Because my girls sit at the kitchen table to color and craft (I don’t trust them to be out of sight with things like scissors and glue and paint just yet), I had been keeping some of their supplies in this cabinet but I’ve never liked how it was organized. It was like we just shoved stuff in there and quickly shut the doors so that nothing would fall out. Well this past weekend I decided I was going to figure out a way to make it work.

I started by cleaning out a drawer and another cabinet in the kitchen that housed some of the girls things….their junk drawer/cabinet if we’re being honest. Some of the things (board games) were relocated to other parts of the house while other things got purged (I found about 100 pages of “art” that I still need to sort through *insert bug eyed emoji*).

The leftover items from the purge and re-location all found a place in the Craft/Activity Cabinet.

The top shelf is their most used items. I found these cute little buckets in the dollar spot at Target a couple of months ago with the intention of using them for this purpose. I filled each one with like items and labeled them accordingly (excuse the awful handwriting…it’s hard to write on a curved surface!)

The next shelf is their big box of crayons (emptying all the torn up crayon boxes totally went against my Type A tendencies but it had to be done) and some of their smaller activity books. On the third shelf I have their Play-Doh and a basket with their Play-Doh tools. Also on this shelf I have their library books from school…I needed to have them in a place where I could remember to send them back when they were due.

The very bottom shelf has paper towels for cleanup as needed, some of their flash cards and then I used a little tray to hold (and keep them from sliding off the shelf) the taller coloring & activity books and construction paper.

So far I am very happy with the way it’s organized. The girls get in this cabinet A LOT…like several times a day and I think it’s going to take a couple of weeks for them to figure out and remember where everything goes because I’ve already had to “fix” it a few times.

**UPDATE: Our craft supply stash has grown they had to be relocated. See their new space HERE!

Do you have a space that you just couldn’t figure out how to organize? What was your solution? Or are you still struggling to find a solution? Let’s discuss in the comments!

Here are some more kids organization posts:

Creating a Functional Homework Station