How to Organize Your Home Office or Craft Space

Welcome friends! Our 2020 Home Organization Challenge continues and this week I want to show you how to organize your home office or craft space. I don’t know about you, but this is an area that can get cluttered very quickly at my house. My office also functions as a craft room and I’ve discovered that the best way to keep clutter at bay is to organize all the different items I have into zones. Keep reading and we’ll discuss how to organize your desk, cabinets, and shelves and how to personalize the space so you enjoy working in it! Come on, let’s get started!

Use the 6/P Strategy to Organize Office/craft space

No need to feel overwhelmed, just use the 6/P strategy checklist, and you’ll organize your home office and craft space in no time! Just do each of the following steps (if you need info on the 6/P Strategy click here):

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Prepare

Get the office ready to organize by grabbing four containers. I like to use the following: a trash bag, a cardboard box, and 2 laundry hampers.

Purge

Remove everything in the space except the furniture and sort all items into one of these categories.

• Trash-throw all unnecessary items in the trash bag
• Donate-put items you would like to donate into the cardboard box
• Relocate-any items that don’t belong in the office should go into laundry hamper #1
• Replace-items that need to stay in the office should be placed in laundry hamper #2

Polish

Now let’s get the office clean! Remember to start at the highest point in the room and work your way down! Use the checklist I’ve provided and mark off each item as you deep clean the room!

Personalize

It’s time to personalize the office space. Use my office printable to help you decide how this space can function best for your needs or if there are any DIY projects you can do to make the office more appealing for you to work in? The printable is free and all you have to do to get it is sign up for our weekly email.

Paint the room

This year, Rich and I switched office spaces. The paint color is sage green, which I like but it doesn’t go with any of my office decors.

So, I decided to use the leftover paint from my dining room. Now it’s light and bright!

Pick decor items that match

The room was a mishmash of decor items and none of it went together, so I needed to figure out how to make it more cohesive. Many of my organizing storage units are black, and I have several items that have black, gold and white in them, so I decided to use this framed picture of my great-niece and the clipboard as my inspiration.

Then, I started “shopping” at my house and brought in other items with those colors. I removed these picture frames from my desk shelves.

Then, I added these black, white, and gold items that I found in other areas of my house.

Easy DIY to make room look cohesive

I only have 3 real house plants and they were all gifts. One was a hostess gift, the second was a gift from a baby shower (the cup it came in was accidentally broken) and the third was a Christmas gift. I put them all on this tray and, as you can see, they don’t match anything.

Here’s what I did to solve the problem. Spray painted a terracotta pot and bought a small terrarium from Michael’s.

Then I re-potted the plants, don’t they look amazing in their new homes??

To hide the red bulb, I used black tissue paper and a white hair scrunchy to cover it! Now it matches!

Add items to top of book shelves

My bookshelves looked very plain without any items on top of them so, I moved things around a bit and found these cute spheres on a clearance shelf at Pier One.

Now, let’s move on to how I organized the room, you’ll notice a few more decorative touches in those photos as well!

Place

Now it’s time to place items back into the office in an organized manner. Don’t forget to do the following steps:

Discard any trash from the area!

If you have items to donate, don’t wait around, take them to the donation center soon!

If you have items that belong in another room, deliver them now.

Replace the items you removed from the room and put them back in an organized manner!

Here’s a tour of my office space, so you can see how I incorporate zones to make my office function best!

Work zone

Let’s start with my desk. Below is a picture before I started organizing the room.

Here is the desk after the process was done.

You can see the workspace of my desk before. I have my files for incoming mail and an organizer for office accessories.

Workspace after I added flowers and this cute hourglass I found at Hobby Lobby! I’m going to use it as a timer for looking at Pinterest and Facebook!! Do you ever spend way more time on those things than you planned to, or am I the only one who does???

Here’s a close-up of my desk organizer before.

Look at the cute black, gold, and white accessories I found at Hobby Lobby to use in my organizer. Makes me excited to get to work!!

Organization of cabinets and drawers

I keep my printer paper and card stock above the printer so it’s easy to grab when needed.

My bin with greeting cards is on the middle shelf. To see how it’s organized, click here. Above that, are tubs with craft supplies and our traditional birthday hat, that each member of the family has to wear on their birthday! Below that is a tub with props for a photo booth!

Office supply zone

I keep all of my office supplies inside the desk.

This drawer contains tissues, paper clips, tape refills, a tape dispenser, stapler, etc.

In this drawer, I re-purposed Crystal Light drink containers to hold small items like pens, rubber bands, pencil erasers, and whiteboard accessories. Behind those are post-it notes and different types of tabs. Then extra paper clips and refill paper roll for my calculator.

Here is the other cabinet

I use dividers to hold large envelopes, address labels, folders, composition notebooks, spiral notebooks, and loose-leaf notebook paper.

Scrapbook zone

I decided to move the furniture around in the room so it wouldn’t feel so cramped. I also wanted the table to be in front of the window, so I could take advantage of the natural light. Believe me, it’s much more enjoyable to look outdoors, instead of facing the wall, when working on projects!

Here is the scrapbook zone before.

And here is it after. I have several different types of containers on the shelves that I use to organize papers, books, magazines, pictures, and miscellaneous items.

I love these leather containers that match the file box on my desk.

Magazine holders are a great way to store items in a vertical fashion, which saves space. Picture boxes can hold many other items besides pictures and can be stacked!

Matching binders that I use regularly here are stored here.

Different size cubes covered in fabric work wonderfully to store miscellaneous objects that you want out of sight.

I bought these white laminate cubes from Michael’s years ago and they are great for storing all of my scrapbook supplies. I also store my calculator and handy label maker here, as well!

Last but not least is my work table and I love the new location by the window! Now if it would just stop raining and the sun would shine, it would be even better! Spring is just around the corner, right?

Put Back

If you want to keep your office organized, it’s imperative that you determine zones and then put things back in those zones so you can stay clutter-free and be more productive than ever!

Happy organizing! Hope this motivates you to organize your home office or craft space, so you’ll be motivated and more productive than ever!

Blessings, Rich and Donna