A Bit of Organizing

 

This past month has been a dream due to some simple organizing. What made it even better was very little cost and prettiness.

Writing/Art Utensils

Last month, I was annoyed at the many pens, pencils, colored pencils, paint brushes, and markers we had in various piles around our home. Anytime my husband or I needed a pen, it required at least a one-minute search or we couldn't even find one. This called for a change! So I went to the Dollar Tree and purchased four long, rectangular bins at $1 per piece. I came home and searched high and low for every writing utensil we had. As it turned out, we actually possessed 40+ pens and more pencils than we knew what to do with.

I found some left over cardstock, cut out small rectangular pieces and wrote, "pens," "markers," "pencils & erasers," and "paint brushes" in white ink to match already existing labels I had already created elsewhere throughout our home. Over the past month, we have had absolutely no issue finding any of these items! 0% stress = happiness. They temporarily sit atop our refrigerator (the earlier post I left about building shelves in my craft area for better organizing is still in the making).

Lid Box
Another majorly satisfying organization project from last month: our lids. Being married almost two years, and dealing with cluttered cabinets, I can't believe I finally decided to find a way to organize our lids. I remember the many times I couldn't open our lid cabinet all the way because the lids would come crashing down to the floor -- yes, we had a lid cabinet (such a waste of space!). I had to quickly throw lids inside and slam the door shut right away.

So, I reused a small carboard box by cutting the flaps off, gluing scrapbook paper along the sides, placing a label on the front, and neatly placing the various-sized lids inside for easy access and compact storage. Now we can utilize our "lid cabinet" for something more important :)

Kitchen Drawer
Third organiztion project from last month: our kitchen drawer. This drawer used to be filled with various used and barely used items (Christmas cookie cutters, rolling pin, grill utensils). All the pieces were scattered and took up lots of space, making cooking/closing the drawer 10x more difficult. First thing I did was remove the unused items. I placed them in a cardboard box, labeled it "kitchen" and stored the box in our utility closet. Then, I created organizer compartments consisting of small cardboard boxes, leftover blox flaps (from the lid project) and a chocolate box with lid. I placed scrapbook paper on the bottom to coordinate with the lid box. A coat of gel medium will protect the paper from bits of water. Finally, I organized our commonly-used kitchen items inside the new compartments.






Again, 0% stress = happiness :)