Craft Storage - It's A Beautiful Thing

I recently decided to revamp the storage boxes I keep my small jewellery making tools and supplies in. If you are anything like me and struggle to make jewellery in a room that is meant for other uses - the dining room and kitchen in other words - instead of having one of those wonderful workrooms/studios/sheds where you can spread things out, you probably get how important having enough storage space is. The dining room table was only used rarely anyway before I started taking over and now isn't used to eat off at all, just for cats to sit on and things to get dumped on to be put away "later".

This is what I had previously...... 

Perfectly good reinforced cardboard drawers but they were starting to get a bit tatty and they just weren't big enough! As you can see I have stuff everywhere, little bits of stuff and big bits of stuff that does start to get untidy and annoying after a while. Bear in mind the photo was taken when I'd tidied up and not when I was in the middle of making something. Then it would be a mass of tools, sand paper, files and bits of metal and metal dust everywhere!

I can't just spread out as it's a through room to the kitchen so I don't have a door to shut and hide the mess from people. I've already aquired one of the kitchen cupboards for my soldering and enamelling tools and supplies plus a cupboard in the sideboard for "stuff" so I definitely needed to sort my worktable space and invest in more nice drawers :D

I found the wooden six drawer boxes on ebay. They are similar to the Ikea drawers but better quality as they are 100% wood and not part hardboard. I also bought a different shaped six drawer Ikea box also on ebay.

After a quick sand I got my beloved stamps and Stayz On ink out and decorated the drawers.

The boxes were then stained and oiled with Danish Oil. I could've left them plain pine I suppose but I think they look so much better and more expensive when they are stained.

I did manage to mess up one of the stamps........... bottom row 2nd from the right....................

And here is the end result, everything moved over to the new boxes but I do still need to do a bit more sorting out. The brown three drawer thing on top that is full of cabs and bezel wire will be moved eventually and I rediscovered all those "useful" bits of metal and wire you keep, some of them from three years ago, that I didn't want to throw away but didn't know what to do with at the time and shoved into a drawer/bag/little pot that I now wonder what on earth I was thinking and know exactly what to do with. Throw gleefully into the bin.

Oh my God look at all those beautiful drawers I can put stuff in.

I need to stop pretending to be an artist and get rid of the paintbrushes though.................