Super Fast Covered Storage Box

I turned 30 recently.  With my age came birthday cards. 

I'm the sentimental type who keeps birthday cards and Christmas greetings, just because I think it's fun to look at that stuff down the road.  I am also the type who gets really annoyed when I come across these old cards randomly while I'm cleaning and have no place to put them, yet when I want to look at them, I can't seem to find them.

I finally solved that the other day.  I got new running shoes and was left with this perfectly good empty box.  I decided then and there that I would use that box to corral my cards from now until forever. 

I grabbed a roll of contact paper that I'd recently found at the local Target.

You can find it online here. I love it so much that I'm lining/covering everything with it.  
I wonder if it would work on my truck... Just kidding.  Maybe.

Anyways, some quick measuring and cutting and bam!  Pretty covered box to store stuff in.

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Seven Thirty Three: Inspire Me Wednesday!

New Toys!

Santa was good to my organizational side this year!  (and by Santa, I mean my hubby)

I've got some new toys and I am excited to show you what I've been doing with them!

First and foremost is my new label maker. 

I heart this label maker. I've had a basic $15 Dymo handheld label maker for a while and it did great things for me. But I was ready for the next step.


My other new toy is a laminator!

Thanks to several other blogs going crazy with the labels and the Washi tape, added to the fact that I've got dogs and dirt, having my signs and labels protected in some way seemed like the smart thing to do. 

Between these two babies, my office/dog room and my spare bedroom are in for a complete makeover.

I might have also spent a good chunk of my Christmas gift cards on organizing stuff, like baskets and bins. It seems kind of oxymoron-esque to be bringing all of this stuff into the house in order to make the house look less cluttered and more organized... But I have to trust the system. Plus for every single item that came in, one old item must go out. So I guess that helps.

Yarn, Yarn, Yarn!

I totally and completely love yarn.  I didn't know that I loved yarn, but then I bought a skein to teach myself to crochet and a freaking monster was born.

A few years ago, my hubby's cousin's stepmom crocheted her stepson a gorgeous afghan.  The next time I visited, I fell in love and insisted that she make us one as well!  Once I had my precious bundle home, I promised myself that I would learn how to create such a beautiful thing.

Fast forward a few years, I am now a decent crocheter (as long as you don't ask me to make anything outside of a strait line).  Pair that with my intense, deep seated need to help the less fortunate, I began crocheting scarf after scarf after scarf to donate and now I've got one heck of a mess in what is my yarn stash.

I've got half finished projects in every single drawer. There is no rhyme or reason to the way my yarn stash is 'organized'. You couldn't even call this organized chaos, it's just chaos. All by itself.

I dumped everything out and forced myself to make decisions. (I hate making decisions!) What to ball, what to frog, what to scrap. For you non-yarn folk, 'frogging' refers to taking apart a project, unraveling the crochet or knit to take it back to just yarn so it may be used for something else.

I'm not done organizing, so I don't have an 'after' picture to show you yet. But I discovered that I loooove to take pictures of yarn! So until I have a finished project, I'll leave you with some shots of my newly organized box of fun yarn!

SO PRETTY! Oh I love yarn. Yarn, yarn, yarn, yarn. Even the word is awesome!

If you are visualizing a crazy looking lady with wild hair, the whites of her eyes showing and downing a pot of coffee while tossing yarn around and singing 'Yarn, yarn, yarn, yarn' really really fast, that's okay. That's probably what my hubby saw, too. It's all good!

Bedroom Closet - Part 1

Something happened this weekend that I feel a desperate need to share with you.

The closet in our bedroom got sick... and threw up all over my house.

Not that bad? Well, this is a fraction of the overall mess. What is worse is that this went down on Sunday, and now it's Wednesday and I haven't made any progress in sorting through my clothes. 

It's long past time that I did a complete overhaul on my wardrobe, but it's such a huge, overwhelming task that I hesitate to begin. I don't know how!

Then like an angel sent to me from above, I found Laura's 31 Day to Organized Closets.  Just stumbled upon it like a woman lost in the desert stumbles upon a truck carrying gallons of cold Aquafina.  (Sorry, that's the only way I could make you understand!)

Taking advice from her challenge, I was able to finish up the re-do part of my closet and come up with a plan to begin tackling the sorting process that comes next!

So let's back up.  My clothing situation has been pulling at me for over a month now.  I've been throwing clothes everywhere.  During one innocent trip to Wal-Mart, I picked up this $9 hanging shelf thingy in an effort to try and tame the situation.  When I got home, I was excited to hang it up and get started, only to discover that crap was piled so high on the floor of my closet that the shelf couldn't hang all the way down!  It was kind of like trying to paint over a hole in the wall.  It just was not. going. to. work.   

The purging of my belongings from the very tiny space that is our closet held no rhyme or reason.  I grabbed everything I could wrap my arms around and hauled it out of the bedroom.  Here is what it looked like free of, well, everything.   Except the hangy thing that started it all.

I hauled out the same paint and adhesive paper that I used for my Scary Kitchen Sink project and went to work. Two coats of paint later, this is what I had.

The paper was only rolled out by this point so I could decide if I was actually going to use it. I did end up using it, last night after deciding it was time to get my butt in gear. Which means that it's been sitting just like this... since Sunday.

There is one little piece of awesomeness from all of this chaos. There was finally enough of the paint gone that I could ditch the gross, drippy paint can and replace it with a mason jar.

Oh mason jar, how I love thee...

Bag Wrangling

These cabinets hold a secret.  A dirty, dirty little secret.

Ugh. I'm so ashamed. Here goes nothing.

Bags. So many bags.

For years I've been stuffing and shoving grocery and shopping bags into this cabinet.  There are several hundred bags here of the plastic and paper sort.  I have no idea why a person would need this many bags.

I've always intended to weed them out, but... Well, I never got around to it.  Obviously.

There is a grocery bag storage project that has been floating around Pinterest and the blogosphere for quite some time.  It is time to put two and two together and clean this mess up!

You take an empty Clorox wipes container.

Remove the label.



I wrapped a piece of scrapbook paper around it and used spray adhesive to glue it to the container.

While that set, I began thinning out my bag collection!  Wow my cabinetry is old.

I shoved appx 30 bags into the container. The rest are outta here.

Now that I have uncovered a clean but ugly cupboard, I can't leave it that way. So I guess this post will have a part two! But I'm happy to have additional storage space in the kitchen. I mean, can a girl have too much kitchen storage? No.

Stay tuned!

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DIY Storage - Freebie!

Going through some older photo files from the summer, I came across a few from a quickie project I did back in July. I thought I'd share!

I love movies, and we have a lot of them.  Unlike the rest of the world, I refuse to part with my perfectly good VHS tapes and re-purchase every video I have in DVD form.  There is an endless supply of VCR's available for very few dollars and I suspect there always will be. 

While I love movies, I really hate VHS and DVD case towers.  They are ugly and they get in the way and they take away from the flow of my house.  I was keeping my VHS tapes in a very pretty storage basket until recently, but then I needed that basket for something else.  Rather than spend a lot of money on more storage baskets, I decided to convert a box that I was just about to tear up and recycle.

Let me introduce the mason jar box!

This box was exactly the right size needed to fit the VHS tapes that suddenly had no place. But it was kind of ugly...

Enter, Elmer's spray adhesive and a five dollar book of scrapbook paper that I've had for a couple of years now.

These books usually come with two sheets of each color/pattern, and two sheets covered this box just perfectly. I hardly had a sliver of paper left when I was done.

 

Please disregard the quality of this photo.  For some reason, Picasa decided that it needed to auto enhance the picture before I could have it.  And yes, that Aussie in the background is looking at me forlornly because I'm playing with cardboard instead of with her.  I can be such a jerk, I know.
I measured roughly and cut the paper, then sprayed on the adhesive and before I knew it, I was done.

This baby isn't going to win any awards for it's beauty, but it sure as heck works for me! And even better, it was pretty much a freebie!

Bonus, there is room to stack another one right on top of it so that you wouldn't even know there were VHS tapes there to begin with.

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Savvy Southern Style