I worked with my first official client today! A huge thank you to Beth, the art teacher at my school, for believing in me enough to book me to come help her organize her room! The art studio is a huge space, complete with many cabinets, closets, and storage rooms. We definitely had our hands full! Take a look at some of the before pictures to help set the scene...

Beth had some great ideas on what she wanted for the shelves that the students will access during the day. Together, we were able to come up with a system that will hopefully help students locate materials they will need while working on different projects. Beth had already set this system up last school year by putting boxes of markers in colored baskets. Each seat at the table had a box of markers assigned to it, and the colored baskets matched the different table colors (red, yellow and blue). We then found twelve colored buckets that fit perfectly in the cubbies! These will hold scissors, pencils, and erasers for each table. The area is so much cleaner now and will hopefully work well with students.

From there, we moved on to the storage room. This space comes across as very intimidating, purely based on the size and amount of stuff inside. It was a dream for me, though, and I couldn't wait to get my hands on it! Beth and I moved all of the art supplies (markers, crayons, colored pencils, etc.) out to the tables in the room. I definitely need to make a mess and see everything I'm working with before I start the process of consolidating and organizing. After we unloaded everything, Beth worked on other tasks around the room while I set to work on organizing all of the supplies. Throughout the whole process, we were fortunate enough to be able to use boxes, baskets, and bins that Beth already had in her room. She already had so much to work with! After organizing all of the supplies, I set to work on getting them into the storage room so they could be easily accessible for her when she is planning lessons.

The closet was definitely a big task, and we weren't able to get to all of it in our 5 hour time frame unfortunately... Beth says she plans on having me on retainer! :) As I said earlier, I make a big mess before I organize anything. So I started off by taking everything off of the shelves and sorting it while I did so. I was then able to put all of the art supplies on one set of shelves so they were in a central location, making it easier for Beth when she is looking for materials during the school year. I tried to make a point to not layer the supplies so none of them were hidden from view. One of her main complaints with the closet before was that she didn't know what she had. I think it looks much better!

The last task of the day was to tackle ALL of the paper... something we didn't get finished today; however, we did make a dent. Before we started, the packages of paper were stacked on top of each other. This didn't make it very easy to access the paper because Beth had to move around different stacks to get what she wanted. In order to solve this problem, we moved one of the shelves down a little bit and then stood the paper up. This will make it much easier to get what she wants without pulling a whole stack of paper down on top of her.

I had so much fun working with Beth today and feel great about what we were able to accomplish in our five hours of work. My hope is that Beth feels more relaxed and prepared for the school year ahead!