art studio Archives - Ashley Hackshaw / Lil Blue Boo

Over the past few days we’ve been cleaning out the basement. There used to be some drainage issues but we’ve fixed all of those over the past year with gutters and re-grading. This room I thought would make a great art studio:

We fixed cracks and painted the walls to start with a clean slate:

To keep in line with our reclaimed theme of the house everything will also be thrifted or secondhand in the art studio. I had these old metal mattresses and dissembled them using a bolt cutter:

I’m hanging two of these on the wall instead of bulletin boards:

That’s all I’ve done for now. We have a few baseboard heaters I can install if it gets too cold but normally it stays a pretty even temperature down there, especially with the dehumidifier that warms up the air. I’ve just been painting outside and in the garage and enjoying the nice mountain weather as long as I can!

Since moving to the House on Hospital Hill everything has just been organized in “survival mode.” Brother P-Touch invited me to try my hand at some organization projects and so I recently re-organized all my craft and art supplies. Here’s my little animated gif of the process for my supply drawers…Max was so interested in what I was doing:

Organizing Art Supplies

There was a method to my madness: if I use something at least monthly it can stay in my flat file drawers, otherwise iot’s either banished permanently or to the basement. I basically pulled everything out first, sorted and then labeled and put things back in. I’m so organized now that I ended up with empty drawers to fill up in the future:

Things that don’t fit into the flat file drawers usually fit into these scrapbook boxes. It’s easy to distinguish what is in each one when they are labeled correctly:

The boxes are also great for organizing all the artwork and items Boo brings home from school. Organized by year:

As the years go by I usually revisit the boxes and things I thought were important become not-so-significant-anymore. What was maybe once three boxes can now be fit into one and then I can use the old boxes for new organization because the labels are easily removed:

And when I get to labeling I just can’t stop. We have remotes for all the fans and lights in the house and I label each one to keep them straight:

I love all the ideas that are being added to Brother’s “Label It” Pinterest board this week. Make sure to check it out to see some great organization and labeling ideas!