Arts & crafts corner in our house

I realized that since we’ve moved to this house two years ago, I haven’t had a good setup for toys. We renovated our basement last year and it is now AWESOME, but I have yet to give our toys and arts and crafts the TLC they need.

With two kids now in full time school I find myself wanting to go through and set everything up better. I finally have the time to do so. I also recognize that I need to set things up better for them at their current ages. They don’t always want to share toys and art supplies. Two of my kids have nightly homework now that sometimes requires scissors, markers, etc. And Valentina is three and a half now, the prime age for getting into arts and crafts a lot.

So this is what I did! I randomly, despite having a ton of things on my to do list, decided to tackle the arts and crafts situation. I took out all of our supplies from every nook of our house and laid them out. Then, using things I already have at home, reorganized it all. I took then closet doors off of our “guest room” closet and turned it into a more useable space for us. Without the closet doors the space is easy for all of us to access. Sliding closet doors never seem to work for me because I like to see both sides of a closet at once.

Here’s how I organized it:

1: Each child has a memory box where I store very special artwork, not so special certificates they might want to keep, etc. I keep those bins up high so that no child can access them without permission. I started one for each child at birth and we keep adding to it for the years.

2: Out of reach art supplies go on this high shelf. Valentina can’t be trusted yet to have access to acrylic paint, the glue gun, stamps or ink.

3: Each child has a school worksheet bin here where they can put the millions of papers they come home with each day. My kids feel pretty bummed out when they catch me throwing these worksheets out, so I’m letting them keep them for now. They can stay within reach because I don’t care if they get destroyed and would love for them to be repurposed as recycled paper for other projects.

4. My kids have been having a hard time sharing supplies, especially at homework time. I finally bit the bullet and set up each child with his own supply bin. Each one contains crayons, colored pencils, regular pencils, scissors, an eraser, a sugru tube, their journals and anything art related that specifically belongs to one of them. For example, Raffi has a Star Wars workbook that is special to him. He doesn’t like to share it because Valentina rips out pages, so he will keep it in his bin.

I’m SO excited about this new setup. The kids came home from school today and immediately threw their worksheets into their bins and then took out their supply stuff to start creating. Clean up was easy too as they only have a few colored pencils, crayons, etc to manage. To lessen the clutter, a good alternative to art supplies would be devices like an ipad drawing tablet because kids can still explore their creativity with it.

What a win!!!

I know it seems so silly to write a whole thing about organizing their art supplies, but wow does it feel good. I am a really good mom when I have order and can maintain order, so I like to set myself up for success and set them up for success.

Now I need to tackle the basement… that’s next week’s project!