If you've been following our downsizing journey, you know the craft room was never going to be simple. I went from a huge space to whatever square footage I could carve out - and I promised myself something important going in... I was going to live in this house, not fight it! However much space I got was however much space I was going to have.
Please note: This article contains affiliate links, and that means that I may earn a commission if you buy something. Read my full disclosure here.
This post covers three separate craft room decluttering sessions, filmed as they happened - mess, meltdowns, and all. If you're downsizing your own craft space (or honestly any space), I think you'll see yourself in at least one of these stages.
Video 1: Setting Up the Bones - Storage Before Sorting
Before I could declutter anything, I had to give myself somewhere to put things. This first session was all about getting the storage skeleton in place before touching a single box.
The Kallax cubes went in first, but I knew immediately they weren't going to hold everything - that's just math when you're downsizing a whole craft room. So step one was deciding what kind of storage I still needed to order (closed shelving was already on my list) instead of pretending the cubes I had would magically stretch.
Then came my favorite part of any organizing project: the boxes of boxes method. This is genuinely how I start every single time, because - as my son's girlfriend put it perfectly - the hardest part of organizing is not knowing where to start. So I don't start with "where does this go forever." I start by sorting into smaller decorative boxes, vintage boxes, and Kallax bin inserts, just to get things grouped into some kind of category. It's not the final home. It's step one of many.
Here's a decluttering truth nobody tells you: your organizing logic doesn't have to make sense to anyone but you. Fabric tape and embossing powder go together in my brain because they lived in the same drawer years ago. That's not a rule from a Pinterest board - that's just how my brain filed it, and honestly? That's allowed.
By the end of this session, Johnny had built my rotating bookshelf, and I was already thinking three steps ahead - which box needed to move so it wouldn't get trapped once the shelf filled up, which corner needed to stay accessible. That's the part of downsizing nobody warns you about: you're not just organizing for today, you're organizing for the version of the room that doesn't exist yet.
Video 2: The Dollar Tree Run and the Great Paper Sort
Session two started with a supply run - because sometimes decluttering isn't about getting rid of things, it's about finding the right containers so the things you're keeping actually have a home. Dollar Tree came through with narrow clear bins, acrylic organizers, and my favorite find, a container that fit so perfectly in one spot that I immediately needed five more of them!
This is also where the real "stuff shuffling" phase kicked in. If you've ever downsized, you know this stage: boxes get moved so furniture can come in, furniture gets moved so boxes can go back, and for a while it looks like you're making everything worse instead of better. I want to normalize that, because it's such a real, unglamorous part of the process.
The biggest project of this session was tackling paper storage - postcards, vintage photographs, ephemera, magazines. I made a call that I think is a really useful decluttering principle: just because something used to belong in your craft space doesn't mean it still does. A stack of plain copy paper had been living in my craft cabinet for who knows how long, and the second I really looked at it, I knew it needed to go - either to the actual copy paper stash or straight to recycling.
I also had an honest moment in this video that I want to include here, because it's real: there was a day I looked at my cabinet-less craft room and just felt done. Not depressed, I've been open about living with clinical depression, and this wasn't that - just genuinely deflated that the piece I needed hadn't arrived yet.
So I leaned on something I learned from April at the Spacemaker Method... when you can't finish, you can still calm it down. I didn't organize the whole room that day. I just tidied enough to make it feel manageable again. That's a decluttering tip worth remembering: progress doesn't always mean "done," sometimes it just means "less loud."
By the end of the session, three boxes were fully emptied, my magazines were tucked into flat-pack file holders hiding behind my Kallax bins, and my postcards and photos finally had drawers to call home.
Video 3: The New Cabinet and the Finish Line
Session three opens with the moment I'd been waiting for - the big mixed media cabinet finally arrived. And in true downsizing fashion, the room looked worse before it looked better, because every "I'll deal with that later" pile had been getting chucked on top of the old spot in the meantime.
This is the video where all the earlier sorting finally paid off. Because I'd already grouped things into categories back in sessions one and two, I could look at the empty cabinet and actually make decisions: what goes at eye level because I use it constantly, what goes down low because it's bulky and occasional, what doesn't need to live in the craft room at all (looking at you, printer, which Johnny wisely pointed out we barely use anymore).
This session also had the hardest kind of decluttering decision - the "I love multiple options and have to pick one" problem. I had two styles of storage I genuinely liked: my handmade decorative boxes and clear acrylic bins. Instead of picking one and getting rid of the other, I made a real call - the decorative boxes get a place of pride because I made them, and I trimmed my acrylic bins down from five to four instead of eliminating the whole system. Sometimes downsizing isn't "yes or no," it's "how much of this do I actually need."
By the final walkthrough, every zone had a job... the desk was cleared, the rotating bookshelf was organized, the cabinet was full but not crammed, and everything was tucked in enough that you wouldn't even notice the storage from the next room over. That was always the real goal. Not a craft room that looks like a magazine spread, but one that works, and doesn't announce itself the second you walk by!
