Apartment-Friendly Craft Station

Apartment-Friendly Craft Station

My husband and I currently have a nice 2 bedroom apartment. One of those is our bedroom, or course. The other bedroom is a multipurpose room, including the following purposes: video games, mechanical engineering, arts and crafts, sewing, storage, bedding, laundry, and a guest room. 

Lately, it's looked a little like this: 

It's essentially been turned into a giant junk drawer. Anything we don't want to deal with or need to store somewhere has been thrown in this room. 

I tackled this project over the weekend, and I have to say I'm pretty proud of the results. I needed something that was functional, attractive (or at least not a complete eye-sore), not very permanent (since we hope to be moving into a new house soon!), and takes up a minimal amount of space. 

Here's what I ended up buying: 

• 4 stackable storage crates (as pictured above. It's almost like one of those "I Spy" books)
• (1) 1 x 6 board that was 7 ft long
• 2 L-shaped brackets

Luckily, I already had 4 stackable storage crates, stain, zip ties, and black spray paint.

Here's what I did: 

• I spray painted the pink crates to match the ones I already had
• Once they were dry, I made a two towers of 5 crates. Since the different brands didn't securely stack on top of each other, I just zip tied them together. Not very classy, but you can't see it when it's all finished. 
• Stained the board
• Hung my L-shaped brackets to hold the board right above the two crate towers
• Screwed the brackets to the board

Ta-da! Much better: 

I only had to put in a few nails, since there wasn't going to be anything heavy on my shelf. 

Quite the transformation for a weekend project and $30!