Overhauling A Professional Puppeteers' Room: Part 1

Listen, some things are just more fun to organize than others. Paperwork? Bleh. Tupperware lids? Mostly bleh. (Unless you can fan them out in rainbow order.)

Ahh, but organizing puppets?

SIGN ME UP.

Happily that's exactly what John did when he got the e-mail for our latest room makeover.

Kelsey and Calvin are professional entertainers, puppeteers, and Muppeteers here in Orlando. Not only do they perform at the local theme parks, they also have some incredible side projects and passions. Kelsey does adorable puppet videos on TikTok for nearly a million followers, while Calvin is the creator of his own entire puppet troupe (!!), Bird Call. Bird Call has a family-friendly Youtube series, a 2-part musical, and even appears at live events here around town.

So yeah, these two are total rock stars.

And since they're friends of friends - and Kelsey's sis is a longtime Epbot reader (hi, Elizabeth!) - we connected a few months ago to discuss... THE PUPPET ROOM.

This felt like a good time to bring back dramatic chipmunk.

We're still mid-process, but let me take you on a tour of the Before, and talk about some of the things John and I hope to help with. This won't be the prettiest post, since the eye candy will (hopefully) be when we reach the "Afters", but I think you'll still find some helpful nuggets.

Let us... BEGIN.

Stepping inside is a short hallway -  you can already see this is an oddly shaped room.

Inside is a large-ish space that functions as both Calvin's office and Kelsey's puppet-making work area. They also display lots of Super Cool Stuff, which Distracted Jen A Whole Lot. :D

The first challenge in this room is lighting: We need more of it. However. Challenge #2 is that this is a rental, so we can't hard wire anything or do too much damage to the walls. That's... tricky.

The next - and arguably biggest - challenge is creating efficient storage. Everything is surprisingly well organized and even labeled, but Kelsey & Calvin had run out of places to put all the various bins and bags. That's why I did a happy dance when I looked in the closet:

 Look at all that underused space! YUSS.

I like to start with the closet when re-organizing a room; once you maximize that, you know exactly how much storage you'll need in the rest of the room.

Usually we'd take out that white wire shelf and build a whole mess of custom shelving here, but again, it's a rental. So instead you can see John and I've already taken off the bifold doors (I think we'd been there 10 minutes?) to make it easier to access and open up the corner. (We stored the doors in their garage; it's easy enough to put them back when they move.)

With the doors out of the way, we turned our attention to finding tall things we could move out of the room and into the closet, like these plastic storage towers:

After some measuring and a little stacking, we discovered all 4 of their drawer units fit PERFECTLY inside the closet:

Sweet!

Without the closet doors in the way they have full access to all the drawers, plus there's an extra 4-5 inches on either side for my clever - if I do say so myself - fabric organizer.

We added plastic slider feet & a wire handle to the side towers, so they can slide out of the way to better reach those side walls, too.

Here's a better look at the fabric, since I'm proud of all my rainbow rolls:

As a puppet maker Kelsey has LOTS of fabric scraps, which used to be stacked in drawers or bags where she couldn't see what she had. Now they're neatly rolled in rainbow order, and the clear pouches let her see them all at a glance!

That's a hanging shoe holder, btw:

These are $10 on Amazon, and I got one for each side of the closet. We only needed one for the fabric scraps, though, so for the other side I'm thinking something like this:

See how perfectly this plastic pencil box fits? This gives me... IDEAS.  ::eyebrow dance::

I'm hoping to find a bunch more pencil boxes - ideally at a dollar store to keep the cost down - and then fill them with sewing notions, art supplies, puppet eyes, etc. I really love this idea, y'all. You could store several drawers' worth of small items in a single organizer, all super visible and easy to grab! Perfect for these awkward edge spaces, or you could hang it over a door or even on a wall where you can't fit bulkier shelving or furniture.

Next we cleared a little more space in the room by assembling a shelving unit in an outside storage closet, and Tetris'ing all the long-term storage bins (mostly set pieces and backdrops) into place:

I think there was half an inch clearance with the door closed. MASTER LEVEL UNLOCKED.

On our second visit you can see some of the display cases have been shifted around, because we were moving on to our next challenge: the windows. Here's the first Before:

And the second Before:

The room has 3 windows, which eats up valuable wall space. Worse, Calvin and Kelsey don't even WANT sunlight in here, because it could fade the puppets. (Those are room-darkening curtains.)

So where ARE the puppets? In boxes. Many, many boxes.

But! All those puppets are about to go right over the center window. Lemme show you how:

After carefully measuring and drawing up plans, John went to the hardware store and loaded up on 3/4" PVC pipe, end caps, and T joints.

Everywhere you see a T joint we had to cut the pipe:

Then after the frame we had to cut about 23 support rods. So, a LOT of cuts.

Fortunately I was able to help, but only after John added these extenders to our piper cutter:

A++ would recommend if you have a pipe cutter and small hands, like me.

Here's where we were reeeeallly hoping our measurements were right:

Installation Day!

First John removed the curtain hardware and tacked the room-darkening shade directly to the wall with thumbtacks:

Testing the fit...

Of course we wanted that window to disappear completely, though, so what you haven't seen yet was all the fabric John cut and hemmed to fit precisely behind the PVC frame:

Ta-daaa!

I love it when a good build comes together.

John attached the frame to the wall with 4 C clamps to steady it, but the majority of the weight rests on the PVC legs on the carpet. So again, very renter-friendly, with minimal wall damage.

So...

Want to see some puppets on this bad boy?

HECK YES YOU DO.

Boo to the YA.

These are only about half the total puppets, because we don't want to show the big name Bird Call characters stored this way. (It's a puppet philosophy thing, which I completely respect.) Once all the characters are up there all but three pegs are filled - and let me tell you, that wall is a Thing To Behold. I couldn't stop grinning! Kelsey brought out box after box, introducing us to each character and telling us a little about them before setting each bird in place, and the whole time my inner 6 year old was losing her gosh darn MIND.

You don't get sound with this .gif, so just imagine a high-pitched steam whistle.

I meant to show you the custom desk we're building today, too, but as usual I've talked too much and this post has gotten too long. So, next time! Hopefully by then I'll have a finished build to show, and you can see how we turned a couple of $15 nightstands and a shelf from FB Marketplace into a massive 10 foot divided workspace with built-in storage. I AM EXCITED. Stay tuned!

*****

P.S. If you're new here and looking for more room makeover goodies, check out our extreme office makeover from last December, where we turned a similar closet with bi-fold doors into it's own mini craft room!