DIY: Rainbow-Painted Pegboard To Organize a Teen Crafting Space

Will can occasionally muscle a puzzle onto the kids' shared playroom table, but mostly it's Syd's domain, held by the simple means of attrition. How can a kid stretch out a 1,000-piece puzzle or a coloring book and her pencils when another kid already has the entire table covered in fourteen different slime recipes, all halfway done and half-spilled across each other? And the one bit that doesn't have slime has Perler beads and polymer clay AND a bunch of paint tubes and a wet canvas?

It's madness, and hugely messy, but Syd adores her space, and spends much of each day at that table, listening to audiobooks or YouTube video tutorials of even more weird crafts, crafting her heart out and happy as a clam.

Last summer, in an attempt to contain at least some of the mess (and, more importantly, to keep Syd off of MY work table as much as possible!), I created a couple of giant pegboard organizers for the walls adjacent to that table.

I bought a small and a large pegboard, and taped them into seven sections--the best thing about pegboard is that you can just count holes to make your measurements. The green stripe is going to be slightly narrower than the others, though. That is never not going to bother me.

If I had this project to do over again, I think that I would have bought real paint. They have these "sample" sizes of paint that you can buy that are like just a cup's worth; those and small paint rollers would have been soooo much easier to use, and I wouldn't have had to do so much taping off.

Oh, well. With the spray paint that I used, I had to tape off the area that I wasn't painting, for every single stripe, and it was terribly tedious:

And it got spray paint overspray all over the driveway, but y'all know that has NEVER been something that I've been concerned about.

I think it turned out quite lovely, even if my poor photography skills mean that you can't see how nice the purple stripe looks. Bossy blue washes out shrinking violet!

Matt mounted the pegboards for me, and the next step of the process involved more purchases than I prefer, and the revelation that there exist in the world TWO DIFFERENT SIZES OF PEGBOARD HOLES. So there we went, returning half our purchases and trading them in for a slightly different size.

We've actually had this setup in place for almost a year now, and while it doesn't look as tidy as I'd dreamed, it does contain the mess and chaos and nonsense and keep it off the table and the floor... mostly:

She's organizing her glitter stash in rainbow order, obviously.

That right there is everything that you need to make slime or polymer clay creations, or repaint Monster High dolls or squishies.

Next up: wouldn't it be nice to organize and contain all of the American Girl doll mess and chaos and nonsense?