Organization — Scrapbooking Room (More Cubbies!)

I have a little confession to make. I have another room that started out sort of like this one. Not as bad, but it was one of those cases of, "Take this up to the 3rd floor loft," as things were unpacked in other areas of the house. You can see what developed from that.

Now when I unpacked boxes that were specifically for this room that contained my scrapbooking materials and especially my scrapbooks, I went ahead and put them directly on a shelf so they wouldn't get damaged. That's probably what saved this room from starting out as bad as the school room did.

The original plan for this room was the one Ikea cubbie cabinet that you see with the desk attached. Well, because of my little oops, I ended up with the tv cabinet up here also. It took a couple of days to decide that this would be the perfect spot, but it happened to be in the same finish as the cubbies we already had up there, I realized I could use the extra cubbies that surrounded the tv space, and I didn't have a stand for the tv yet, which was sitting on that white table you see in the corner.

You actually might not be able to see it since it's piled up with stuff.

And I took this extra picture not so you could see more of my messiness, but so my mom could get an idea of the layout of the house. These are the stairs that lead down to the second floor. My back is against a wall, and if I look to the right I am staring at Chatty's bathroom and bedroom. Her bedroom is opposite this loft, and the bathroom entrance is in the 'hallway'.

The first evening I worked in the room for about four hours. During that time I was also preparing things to take to an all-day scrapbooking event at church the next day, so really I'd have to say only half the time or less was really spent working on the room. This is what it looked like after that first session:

Then over the course of the next couple of days I worked in it a little here and there, tweaking it, staring at it, trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to do with the rest, and I ended up with my final product:


I already had the lamp and just got a new shade. I also still need to find a spot for several boxes of negatives that I'm not willing to purge.

But I'm thrilled with the outcome. I've never had a separate space for scrapbooking, and I'm really not sure I'll know what to do with myself. We have a chair in the garage that we're going to bring up now that there's room so Hubby can come visit me, but he's not so sure he wants to watch Matlock and Murder, She Wrote episodes on DVD with me. Maybe I should have said he doesn't want to watch them, but we're putting the chair up there in case he decides he wants to come spend time with me anyway.