A Super-Frugal Scrapbook Nook

Ever since we remodeled our living room  and added an extra office in January, I’ve been lucky enough to have an office/craft room to myself.   But once the baby is born, my office will become a nursery.   So I’ll be back to sharing my office with our guest room, which I’ve done before, so no big deal.   But I still wanted a place where I could scrapbook and make cards and other crafts.  

The closet in our current guest room (soon to be my office and the guest room) has been filled with ‘stuff’ for the five years we’ve lived here.   It’s got our snowboarding gear, our sleeping bags, sporting equipment that we rarely use (the stuff we use all the time is in a downstairs closet), old yearbooks, extra dining room chairs, etc.   Stuff that we needed to put somewhere and the closet seemed like a good place.   Well, I decided to turn that closet into a scrapbook nook.

We took all the stuff out and found better places for it (including the thrift store for stuff that we hadn’t used in the last year).   Then we dug around in the garage and found pieces of wood to use as batons for a desk surface.   We went to our local Habitat for Humanity thrift store and bought a 2 foot wide door to use as the desk (this was my father’s idea, and was a very good one).   We had originally planned to get plywood at Home Depot for the desk surface, but the door was only $5, already painted white, and had a pre-drilled hole for a door handle, which I can use an electric cord hole at the back of the desk.  

My husband painted a fresh coat of paint on the door, and we trimmed it to fit – that was the hardest part.   The closet has some funny angles, and even the ones that are supposed to be square aren’t really, so we had to do some fancy trimming.   But it turned out great.   We mounted the door-turned-desk into the closet today, and tomorrow I’ll put all my supplies in there.   We’re thrilled with how the whole project went.

The best part?   It cost us $5 for the door, and $4.50 for a lamp I bought at a thrift store to put in the closet for light.   We used wood and screws that we already had left over from other projects, and I’m just going to use the storage supplies I already have to arrange my stuff in the closet.   So for under $10, and a day’s work, I have a custom-made place to craft in my new office.   Now I just need to finish cleaning up the mess we made and find homes for all the stuff that we have stored in the closet of the future nursery…