Craft storage 🤔

[YouAndMeAndThem]

Hi everyone, need some advice from the hive!

My kids craft stuff is driving me insane. Probably made worse by summer holidays but it's just all over the dining room. We have a side board with 2 cupboards, and 5 drawers. Half of it has my husband's hobby stuff in. The other half is just stuff everywhere. Paint and paraphernalia, kinetic sand kits, pens and pencils, paper, colour books, activity books, stickers, boxes of jewellery making stuff, boxes of random craft bits and bobs, playdough!! It's endless and they just get more and more stuff from other people which ends up in another pile on top of the sideboard.

Does anyone have any fab storage solutions for me please?

Personally sideboards don’t work for me. Stuff gets lost at the back, or drawers get wedged shut

I use an ikea Kallax with drona boxes for my craft stuff. You could use different boxes for different crafts, and try to insist on just one box out at a time. They’re roomy enough to hold a lot, ----while look tidy when it’s put away. Your husbands stuff could go on the top shelf.

you can pick up a kallax very cheaply on market place, and drona boxes are only £3/4 each in ikea. They’re much stronger than you’d think

Yeah I think you might be right that the sideboard needs to go 😂 I have kallax in their playroom which I love so might need to look into that!

I love the Kallax, but I love my sideboard more, so I’ve gone tall and thin. £50 from Hobbycraft will get you a tall set of drawers. They come with wheels so you can move them about if you need to park them somewhere else and the drawers come completely out if they want to take their paints to the table.

https://www.hobbycraft.co.uk/really-useful-11-drawer-rainbow-storage-tower/5728951000.html

My yarn is in Kallax. Divided by yarn weight, so I know where to look straight away.

Declutter loads first before planning storage! Could DH’s hobby stuff go elsewhere so you have it as a dedicated craft space rather than a bit of this a bit of that?

I got DD to decorate shoeboxes and I covered a few in wrapping paper then we did pictorial labels for what went in what. So she can pull out a box that’s all the tools – scissors, glue, pencil sharpener – or all the pipe cleaners/googly eyes/gems, and the rule is only 3 boxes at a time and she has to tidy up properly before the next box comes out.

I regularly and frequently clear the cupboard out and I have zero sentiment so the products of all this industrious crafting go in the bin. Also some mice helpfully ate a lot of it. Any kit that’s broken/bits missing/dried up/playdough squished into horrible khaki brown colour gets binned.

He does his hobby at the kitchen table so he needs it there really, but it's really neatly stored away.

Definitely need a big clear out, might be a job for tomorrow morning then a trip to b&m might be in order.

Can you fit plenty in those drawers? They look so shallow 🤔

I have the really useful drawers too (although only 8 drawers high) and they’re only 8cm deep. I use them for ribbon and cord, but for me they’re quite limited

I’ve got a couple of sets of skubb from ikea which I use inside my drona boxes for smaller items. A good thing about them is you can fold them down when you’re not using them. I wish I’d had stuff like this when my kids were little. eg you could have one box with the play doh in, and the cutters in a small skubb box inside the drona box.

Lots of people love the ikea trofast and kallax.

We just have a big plastic box of the stuff we don't want dc to access all the time such as paints and felt tips and then some plastic drawers in their bedroom

I came to ask the same question OP, I started off wanting to ensure my toddler has free access to mark making stuff and now ...it's just everywhere 😭

And the creations that are made - flat/2d art goes straight up on display on the wall in a storage frame (I love our 'My Little Da Vinci' frame), anything 3d gets enjoyed for a week tops then recycled 'so the bin men can enjoy it too'. Apparently that's acceptable to a 2yo but I'm not sure older kids would buy into that so easily 😆

@YouAndMeAndThem the Really useful towers of drawers are fabulous for paper stuff - not so great imo for crafts, art kits etc as the drawers are as shallow as they look. You could opt for a tower with deeper drawers - trouble is they arent designed for heavy stuff so can easily become a problem.
I think have a major clearout first, see what you really want to keep and think about what size stuff you have, what would work best. I like baskets. Preferably a mixture of small and larger - what you wont want is larger boxes/baskets stuffed full and the stuff at the bottom always being over looked/tricky to get too.

Thanks everyone, had a huge clear out and tried to be less sentimental about all their finished colouring books etc and managed to downsize. So the kinetic sand, playdough and paints are all in a small set of plastic drawers. And the rest i managed to nealty sort into the side board and label it all. It looks beautiful, for now 🥰

I have large plastic see through IKEA boxes all stacked up. I can see what's in them without having to move them. They're against the wall in the corner of the spare bedroom, so don't get in the way in the rest of the house.

How large is your budget? This below is one of my goals when I finally have the money!

It folds down into a simple, large cupboard. But I've only ever seen these on adverts.