our work spaces would work, and not a lot of time planning out our storage. Why would we? There is a huge wall mounted shelf on one side of the room, plenty of space for all my craft supplies and Will's books, right?I'd been reading a lot of Chez Larsson back then (still do) and I loved her white on white style so I bought a ton of white storage boxes from Ikea and loaded them up. It was nice to have everything in it's own box. Much easier to find, say, that spool of stretch magic thread or the packet of seed beads when there is a box for everything. But the white on white just didn't work. Partly because there was a lot of not white stuff up there. Lots of architectural book, lots of my antique kids books leftover from the playroom days. It's bugged me every day since.
Earlier this week I was doing some more work avoidance and sat in the office just staring at the wall o shelves. Yes, just staring. I'm sure a couple of neighbors walked by and saw me at it through the window. But between the half ripped off/painted house and the regular sounds of hammers at night, I think they just know I'm crazy by now. But while staring at the wall I decided what I needed was contrast on the back of the shelves. Not the whole shelves, just enough so that the white boxes popped instead of just looking blah. I didn't want to paint because it took A LOT of coats of white to cover the original nasty wood of the shelves in the first place and what if we hated it? So it had to be paper or fabric.
Yesterday I emptied the shelves one by one, culled, sorted and stored, moving the kids books to the living room and some of the uglier crafty things to the closet, and used spray glue to mount some dark gray felt to the back of each shelf.
The wood on the back is slatted and uneven so it was hard to get everything perfectly straight, but the overall effect is just what I wanted. Now that the boxes and books are in their new spots (some of the hard to reach stuff I used a lot while the little used things were easily accessible) I'm liking it a whole lot more. It feels clean and organized which is weird because before it was clean and organized(ish), but just not very stylish. At least I hope it's stylish now. What do we think? Better?