craft center

I started with some striped wall and painted furniture inspiration, and lo and behold, I've schemed up the transformation of an unfinished basement corner into a cozy little craft center... By repurposing old furniture and raiding the paint leftovers from the rest of the house, I even did it on quite a budget.

First things first, I cleared out the odds-and-ends storage from the space, scrubbed down everything, and vacuumed up a bunch of cobwebs from the ceiling. We have quite a clean unfinished basement, but it's still a basement.

basement corner, before

I bought some serious primer just to seal off the walls a bit, and then all the stripe colors are also done with leftover paint from other rooms. I took one of my favorite inspiration pictures and turned the stripes to vertical, as those are easier to tape out straight (shorter lines!), and I must say I was quite pleased with myself for coming up with a pattern that required taping only once.

First, I measured out where the lines would be and then penciled them onto the wall using a level as my straightedge. Then I taped off the two-inch white lines (would have been easier to use 2-inch wide painter's tape, but I had the 1-inch stuff around, so I just did two strips next to each other), and then pressed it all down with a putty knife. After all that, it was on with the paint and then off with the tape. It did require a bit of touch up as the unevenness of the concrete walls allowed a little paint to seep under the tape, but overall, it wasn't so difficult.

tada!

The table was something we had in our old apartment, repainted to fit the new color scheme with paint I already had, and the chairs from our old apartment happen to fit nicely with scheme as is. The rug was an inexpensive find at Ikea, as was the hanging light ($5 for the shade, $3 for the cord!). I also brought in a floor lamp that we weren't using anywhere else since the basement lighting isn't great.

table, pre-makeover

table and chairs, after, with my Martha Stewart
holiday idea magazine ready for action

And for storage of all my supplies, I used several inexpensive shelving things that used to be in our closet, and I got one more (with doors) on sale at Target, plus the wacky wooden shelves that somebody built in the basement years ago. I'm planning to put up a peg board as well for some additional storage space - scoped out for about $6 at the hardware store.

store the pretty stuff on the open shelves; baskets
of additional supplies go inside the cupboard

I think I spent about $75 on the whole thing, and it was quite fun to scheme up and do. Of course, there's danger of spending a lot more $ on craft project supplies, now that I have a place to work!

[shared here]