Ok, so the title is a little misleading. It’s really OUR craft and computer room and we had a similar room in our previous house. The exciting news  today is that after a few months in our new house, the craft room is finally unpacked and ready for use! And it is huge… it has all of the furniture from the last house, plus our old couch bed (and room to spare).

We had a long delay with unpacking the room because of our cats. We decided that we needed to protect our raw wood Ikea Ivar shelving units from their fur. Since the shelves were unfinished, cat fur stuck to them and was impossible to get off. So we took the time to sand all 25 shelves and two cabinet doors and apply three coats of Minwax fast drying polyurethane. It took awhile.

When we first installed our Ivar units in the previous house, we need to have some amount of hidden storage for office and craft supplies and all those other things that would look silly just left out somewhere. To create hidden storage, we have some galvanized metal doors and wood cabinet doors. However, Ivar does not come with anything to enclose the sides of the unit, so when we installed the doors I knew I needed something to cover the sides so people couldn’t see the messes we were hiding.

The tall thin shelving unit, mostly dedicated to crafts.

The shorter shelving unit, mostly dedicated to books and office supplies.

At that time, I decided to use plain canvas cloth and print it with sponge stamps I made myself. It was a good idea, but I’ve not been entirely happy with the execution.

Side of the cabinet with hand printed canvas.

Side of the office supply cabinet.

Since we were taking the time to upgrade the shelves with polyurethane, I decided to also upgrade the fabric. After a misguided decision to try to make my own chevron pattern fabric starting from canvas again, I quickly realized I could buy chevron home decor fabric on Etsy. A few days later, it arrived in the mail.

Chartreuse home decor chevron fabric.

I then started the somewhat frustrating process of prying all of the staples out of the shelf supports. I tend to get a little staple gun crazy sometimes. After taking out the old fabric, I used it as a template to cut a piece of the chevron fabric. To keep the fabric from unraveling and so that I didn’t have to do any sewing, I used pinking shears to cut the fabric. I stapled the fabric to the sides, the bottom shelf (so nothing can fall out) and any wood supports that happened to be positioned at the top or bottom of the fabric.

The inside of the shelf after stapling the new fabric

My arm sure is sore now after prying out staples and then maneuvering the staple gun over my head. I’m pretty short so some of these shelves were hard to reach.

The new fabric makes the craft room stylish.

The other stylish shelf unit.

A view of both shelves.

Someday we’ll get around to personalizing this room… painting the walls, hanging decorations, adding curtains or a valance, replacing the tiny little white fan… and so on.