Do It Yourself
The last few years have seen a massive influx of people creating spaces for themselves dedicated to tinkering, making, designing, and just having some fun using their hands. These DIY craft rooms and hobby rooms signal a return-to-basics for many people who are aiming to bring back an element of good old fashioned manual dexterity into their lives.
Sure, modern technology has us texting and typing all day, but the craft room is a space to stimulate those seldom used stabilizer muscles and exercise the brain in creative and imaginative ways to create stuff.
Like any dedicated space, much like a home office, garage, or a reading nook, the home craft room needs a certain few things to be able to do its job well. Certain pieces of furniture and decor help to boost the creative spirit and can assist in developing a space that really gets the juices flowing. In this post, we’ll outline a few quintessential pieces of furniture, creative storage solutions, seating options and durable materials that can take an ordinary room and make it a fantastic craft room for the whole family to enjoy.
Central Work Space
A garage workshop doesn’t function very well without a workbench, and a home office can’t be of much use without a great desk - similarly, an inspiring craft room can’t inspire much without a big open space on which to work.
A centralized workspace in the form of a broad and sturdy table is a great place to start building up the room. The table needs to be a good height to accommodate working from both a seated and standing position, depending on your weekly projects, and should be big enough to host a plethora of materials and supplies, from rolls of cloth, to beads, paints, canvases, etc. If your central workstation is cramped and tiny, you can limit your own abilities and creativity. Give yourself the square footage to work on whatever scale you choose.
As such, a big craft table should be able to stand up to all kinds of abuse, and should be able to absorb some punishment along the way. Things like x-acto blade slices, chips and gouges, paint spills and the like need to either be reduced, or eliminated by choosing the proper material. We recommend a stainless steel tabletop as a durable and capable work space that can be wiped down, beat up, and can can still look great when you clean up at the end of the day. An inexpensive pub table could be another good option for a craft room work station. Pub tables are tall and sturdy, allowing you to work standing up - and they're often square, so they fit into most rooms with relative ease, allowing you to work around it.
Alternatively, a stand-alone kitchen island can also make for a perfect central work station. The underneath of many rollable kitchen islands and butcher blocks can be used for storage, and their mobility make them perfect for custom-tailoring your space to different projects.
Shelving
Staying organized is a big deal in the hobby or craft room - the need to create and progress your work is only as strong as your ability to find what you need without having to tear apart the entire space. Shelving is of the utmost importance to house all of your paints, brushes, silk-screening gear, how-to books, or other supplies. One of the biggest advantages to investing in a good shelving system is freeing up your table space and workstation from clutter of all kinds. Shelving is key to helping you actually create in your craft space.
The main function of shelving is to free up space and keep things organized for you to do what you want to do in the space. Open-faced shelving is perfect when your craft room is meant for a plethora of different hobbies and ideas - this way supplies can change size and shape and still be accommodated on your shelving solutions.
Reuse an old hutch or pantry cabinet to store and organize smaller bits of craft room supplies that you don’t want the kids getting into, like paints, glitter, scissors and other sharp objects, etc. And designate a section of your craft room solely to shelving; in a corner of the room, or an awkward hutch space, install shelving that can be set back from the action of the room.
Industrial glam is a cheap storage solution that can be custom-tailored to any space. Take inexpensive metal shelves and spray paint them to match or complement your space for a reliable and chic storage solution that’s capable of holding hundreds of pounds.
Storage
Part and parcel to shelving is the storage solutions that add a second tier to your organizational efforts. Storage can mean many things, but in a craft room, a good idea is to label and organize your supplies and tools in sealable, stackable boxes, buns, or plastic containers.
Recycle glass jars to hold leftover ribbon from scrapbooking projects, shells, buttons and pins from collage projects, and odds-and-ends that haven’t found their place yet - what’s better - label them by adding your own creative flair using chalkboard paint to make washable, reusable storage solutions.
And use an over-the-door organizer to take advantage of vertical space that most people neglect to use behind the door. If your craft room features an existing closet, naturally use its space to store your things, but add a piece of pegboard to the inside of the door itself to make a customizable space perfect for storing threads and sewing materials - interchangeable hooks can be purchased from your local neighbourhood hardware store.
Try converting an old wooden wardrobe into a space for construction paper and other materials that can take up lots of space on coveted shelving. Wardrobes and hutches are great piece of furniture for craft rooms because the also provide a tabletop for other purposes aside from storage. Use the top of the hutch for a stereo system, or an incense tray to help you relax while using your craft room.
Seating
If you’re going to be in the craft room creating all day, you should probably be comfortable, no? What’s the point of fleshing out all of your creativity to bring some light into your life if you’re uncomfortable while doing it?
When you’re considering seating choices for the craft room, choose something that you’re going to be able to sit in for long periods of time without becoming agitated or fidgety. Think in terms of seating cushion and the position that you’ll be in - in this regard, briefly introducing yourself to office ergonomics is a good place to start, to avoid neck strain, degenerative and damaging seating positions, and potential shoulder strains, and/or painful arthritic conditions like carpal tunnel syndrome.
A standard computer chair is an obvious choice for a portable, adjustable work chair - but a taller table mean that a bench or stool is a better way to go. If you’re into pottery, a swivelling stool may be the perfect choice for manoeuvring around and finding new angles and perspectives to hone your craft. If you want to include a couch, loveseat, or another seating area, consider chic folding bistro chairs, or a slender sofa in rooms that lack big footprints.
Materials
The idea of a craft room is to give yourself a space to get messy, to explore new creative ideas and to satisfy a part of yourself that needs to create things. Within these liberating rooms, it’s understandable that you could make a bit of a mess - creativity has a habit of being untidy and sometimes reckless. The materials that you choose to construct your craft room with, in terms of furniture, should dictate that they can take a certain type of abuse, be easily cleaned, durable, solid and able to handle just about whatever you can throw at them.
This means that shelving should be sturdy and well-built - so we recommend wood or metal as appropriate materials.
For a couch or loveseat to round out the space, certain fabrics are more forgiving to potential paint or ink spills - like crypton, and microfibre, which are durable and spill-resistant upholstery options for a potentially messy place. Leather is another readily accessible furniture material that’s both durable and easy to wipe clean.