Organizing Kids' (Not-So-Typical) Shelves

I figured I needed to just go ahead and put the disclaimer in the title of the post, lest you think this was about toy shelves, or maybe bookshelves. Or even shelves in one of my kid's closets.

But alas, it is not so.

This is how things started out. They've been living in the hall for about three months, since they were unpacked from their moving box. They lined the hall nicely and stayed in place though.

Here is where the remainder was, because these things were in one of Caboose's brother's boxes, since they used to share a room and they got boxed together out of necessity, and of course Buddy wasn't going to let any of it stay in his room until Caboose's room was prepared. (I would have been the same way if it were me if we're just going to be honest here.)

I decided I was going to be little miss handy-girl today. I know how to wield a drill. I just usually let Hubby do it now. But I was tired of waiting. We'd had the white shelf since December. It's June. Hubby is going to read this and say I didn't ask him. I have mentioned it in passing, in my defense.

Buddy came in to help me, since I just have two hands. Plus I think it's good for his future knowledge, in the possibility that he might not live with me forever. We wielded a stud finder (it kept going off incessantly whenever Buddy was around!), a pencil, a level, a hammer, a screwdriver, a drill, and molly bolts. I think that was it. Oh, and I had to stand on our tall step stool. Here is the finished product.

Since the walls aren't painted yet it is much easier to see in the second picture. I used those new Command picture hangers that are kind of like Velcro but not really to hang the Monster Jam poster (since it's already in a poster frame). They are really cool. Once I get a poster frame for the other picture, I'll do the same for it.

If you want to see some of the other surface and shelf organization round-ups that people are doing for this month, go check out The Organizing Junkie and see who's linked up.

Organizing Our Computer Area

This month's organizing round-up is a surface or shelf. Mine that I'm showing you in this post is a combination surface/shelf. It is what used to be our computer desk, and is now two computer desks with storage cubbies between them, from Ikea of course.

Here is the before picture that was taken sometime between Christmas and the middle of February. Yes, took me that long to get it down. Come to think of it, I see a big dinosaur that was a birthday gift in the middle of January for Caboose, so I know it was after that.

After we took the tree down we temporarily put up one of those plastic white folding tables to hold the second computer. I was a little indecisive about what I wanted, and they no longer made the desk like the one we already had. Plus the movers broke it and glued the legs back on that far side (you might be able to see particle board showing above the black metal strip at the bottom...it was completely broken off) so I didn't really know how long this one was actually going to hold up.

The night Hubby and I went to Ikea and measured the floor arrow, I wandered and stared at desks. The plan was to pick something. Wandering always gets my idea cells in my brain flowing. It doesn't happen very often. But I walked away with something totally unexpected that completely works for us.


This is on our second floor loft. Sometime I'll show you the rest of it, but I'm trying to stay focused here and not digress. It's challenging, but I'm determined.

The drawers are something extra that you can purchase to add in with this system (Expedit). I knew one set of drawers would be handy to hide a few things that would be necessary to have in this area.

Pencils, pens, scissors, tape, a couple of small notepads, small stapler, etc. The game box is there because I ran out of small cd cases that I move them all over to, so it's sitting in there for now.

I keep all the chargers we need to get to regularly in here, either electrical or the ones that hook up to the computer for cameras or ipods.

There are a couple of magazine files next to the drawers. One holds my current catalogs, and the other holds a couple of poly files. One of those files holds a bunch of odds & ends papers that would otherwise be scattered all over the desk area but that are notes or things that need to be kept for some reason or another, but not things that need to be filed. The other file holds recipes that I've printed off the computer that haven't made it into a menu plan yet...basically ones that I want to try soon.

The red cd boxes are from Ikea also. I posted about them and my favorite plastic bookends a little bit here. I still need to label all of them, but I thought I'd show you inside them, just so you could see how they are being used.

Kids' cd games. I have the Nancy Drew game cd's separated with a plastic bookend that you can't see. The newer ones come with two cd's that are necessary for game installation, but you only need the first cd to play the game, so I stick the second discs in the back.


School cd's, headphones for Rosetta Stone, my cd's (pictures, software, etc), and a few more game cd's.

My postage scale (usually my packing tape is in this box too, but it's downstairs ready to tape up a box), and an empty box!

One box has all the electronic/computer type cords that go to stuff, and the other box has video camera tapes, my old digital camera that will hold about 16 pictures, and some of our extra cords, because we don't need more than one out at a time.

Those wonderful brown woven baskets on top — one holds my extra printer paper, and the other holds items that need to be shredded. Of course I have a pile of papers and stuff over a foot tall piled up on top of the shredder right now, but we'll just pretend it's not there for the purpose of this post.

One of the woven baskets underneath is empty, and one holds files, primarily ones where I've torn out magazine ideas, but some are school files with catalogs or curriculum plans, and the green files are some that we have to keep from Hubby's military work travel for five years before we can shred them.

I put a couple of the plastic bookends in the back of the last file to hold them up since they don't take up the entire basket.

The blue lidded boxes hold files that we don't access frequently. Off the top of my head I can tell you that the red files are our taxes and my grandparents'/grandma's taxes, and the green files are Hubby's from the military.

The other blue box has a lot of medical records or school records that we need to keep. The brown accordion file doesn't have to be kept, but it has the insurance claims from the first 13-14 months of the girls' lives, and it's pretty astounding. I'm keeping it just for historical purposes.

I also used the plastic bookends at both ends of these boxes even though they were full. They are cardboard-type boxes, so the bookends helped to hold the files upright a little better and gave the boxes more stability.

I love how it looks.

You can check out what other people are organizing, or link up yourself, over at The Organizing Junkie.

You might also be interested in these posts:
The entire surface of my garage floor! — Garage: Before & After
Last month's round-up — Organizing the Master Bedroom Closet

Organizing the Master Bedroom Closet

Let me just start by saying that anyone who has to do a serious clean-up and organization of any closet less than six months after moving into a house is in need of help, especially if they claim to be a normally organized person. Yes, you can just read me into that sentence.

Of course, there would seem to be a very good reason for some of this disorganization. In our house it has a name.

Baseball Cards.

There were two things I was looking forward to when we finally moved into a nice, big house. One was not having anything under my beds, because I didn't want anything there and for the last 20+ years I've had to store things there for lack of other places to put things.

Two was not having baseball cards in my master bedroom closet. Now it might have been a good idea to share this with Hubby, but then I would have gotten the, "Then where do you propose I put them," comment. And at the time I hadn't put much thought into it.

But when we started carrying things in the house and Hubby handed off a box of cards to Sparky and said, "Take these to my closet," I physically cringed. What was I to do? Because while we have a nice, big house, we don't have an excess of closet storage. Yes, we have a basement, but it's not finished, and it's not really ideal for baseball card storage. Neither is the garage.

So if I wanted them out of my closet, I had to find a place for them. Enter The Organizing Junkie's closet round-up and Hubby gone out of town for a week, and I was in business.

Here are the before pictures of my closet, and I'll admit right up front that it's not just the baseball cards.






Since I invaded another closet in this re-do, I'll go ahead and show you before pictures of it too. It's a closet that is in our rec room, a room basically the size of our three-car garage that it is built over. It has a wire hanging closet shelf that the builder put in. I've used it primarily for toy tub storage.

The first thing I did was move the blue tubs down to the basement, then I stacked the four clear tubs on top of each other. I had some stackable shelving that's made for shoes from our old military quarters that we'd been storing in the garage and not using. We'd actually used it to store Buddy's baseball card books on their sides when we lived in Virginia, but we weren't using them now. I pulled them up into the left side of this rec room closet for the majority of Hubby's larger baseball card boxes, and then put some of the odds and ends on the top along with the statuesque little men.

I stacked the vaults, which are longer, in the open floor space between the shelves and the plastic bins on the right side.


After I moved out all the baseball cards, except for two vaults I left on the top shelf, I was able to clean out and organize the rest of my closet. I did not empty the closet out like The Organizing Junkie suggested, but remember I had lived here less than six months!

Here are pictures of the finished master bedroom closet:

In the picture above, that's my clothes hamper you see in the far left tucked under my short clothes, and then my little (Ikea) step stool since I'm a shorty. My white duvet cover with my winter weight (Ikea!) duvet are stored up on the top shelf.

In the picture below, you can see my upstairs tool box down on the floor where all those baseball cards used to live (plus some empty space!).


The cubbies on the wire rack basically serve as linen closet storage for shampoos, soaps, and hygiene items. Um, because there is no linen closet. You probably already saw my towels up on the shelf in the first picture.

If you close the door, here is where my purse stash is located.

I'm saving up for an Elfa closet system, like maybe in a year or two. But for now, it's clean and I can walk in without stepping on anything, and I like that a lot.

And the fact that the baseball cards aren't in there make me so happy I can't even find the words to adequately express it. The fact that Hubby has been back in town for about four hours and hasn't noticed doesn't bode well. I guess when he reads the post he'll know.

Go visit Laura, The Organizing Junkie, to see more closet and cupboard makeovers.

You might also be interested in this post: Organization — Spices

Scrapbooking — Organizing Supplies and the Scrapbooking Process

Okay, so I might get banned from participating in any future monthly organizing round-ups that the Organizing Junkie puts on, but I just couldn't resist this month. And I can't help it if I couldn't put it all in one post. It just wasn't possible. This way I have three novellas so far instead of a complete novel. I'm thinking that I still might get in trouble signing up three times under Mr. Linky though.

This time I wanted to show you two completely different things that are totally related to each other. One is how I store and organize the majority of my scrapbooking supplies, and the other is how I organize the process of scrapbooking to complete albums quickly. I'll show you my supplies first, working from boring to not so boring.

This is one of the cubbies from the other post, and if you'll notice the blue fabric box.

It holds the majority of supplies I need every time I scrapbook...adhesives, cutting system tools, pens, cloth to wipe off fingerprints, etc. I can pull it out and put it back with ease.

I keep extra supplies in a basket on a lower cubbie close to where I sit. That's handy for when I need to grab adhesive refills.

I also keep other templates from my cutting system and punches I don't use very often in a cubbie under the desk.

I keep all of my stickers and papers fairly close to where I sit, or depending, stand. This basket holds all of my smaller sticker packs (in alphabetical order, of course) and the little white basket contains all of my smaller loose sticker strips.

These all hold larger packages of stickers and odds and ends.

Here is where I keep my printed 10 x 12 papers in accordion files.

They sit two cubbies up directly over my desk area. That way if I need to pull one out, it doesn't knock things that are on the desk already. Here's what one looks like labeled and up close.

I keep my solid colored 10 x 12 paper in a zippered box under the desk. It's heavy and large and needs to live there. 12 x 12 paper lives in something similar.

Up on the top shelf I have three-ring binders that hold a multitude of things, from borders for scrapbooking, to idea sheets I've printed off the computer, to printed Creative Memories ones, to printed idea books.



This also usually lives up there.


My current ideas hold ideas I've printed from the computer, some of which I've done and some of which I haven't. Okay, most of which I haven't. It's mostly ideas for page borders.

Here are samples of what are in some of my border books and how I keep them.

Have you noticed my love for page protectors?

Now for the actual scrapbooking process, I have tweaked one that came around about three or four years ago. It was designed to finish a 30-page album in four 4-hour sessions. I'm not going to complicate the explanation by telling you what it was and how I've tweaked it, I'm just going to do a quick run-through of what I do.

I'm going to try to be quick.

I start out with a Creative Memories Power Layouts system. I have the box and two sets of plastic guides (30 total). At this point I either spread out the first two pages or a whole bunch across a desk, table or floor, depending on my mood.

I take the pictures for the album I'm working on and start placing them on the guides something like I might on the album page. I figure out if I have enough for two pages, if I need to cut back to one, combine pictures into a seasonal page because it's not an event...you get the idea. I also put any memorabilia with the pictures at this point.

After I have all the pictures on the 30 guides and the guides stacked up into order for the album (if I didn't lay all of them out), I go through and pick out either an already prepared border, printed paper and/or stickers. I throw these on top of the page. What I end up doing is stacking the whole thing backwards as I do this, and then at the end I have to reverse the stack, but it's not a big deal. If I lay out all 30 guides, or even half, I can do them all at the same time and then just stack them in the proper order top to bottom. I don't crop any photos or paper until I am actually ready to put everything in the album.

This would also work if you don't have this particular system. I had a friend who used, of all things, page protectors to store her photos and stickers for each page. She just kept it in a three-ring binder.

So here is my layout system in action with the top four layouts in the box I currently have going.

I took several pictures of some random pages from one of Sparky's books. You can probably tell from these pictures the way the layouts above coordinate with the how the final product will look.




I keep shapes simple to speed up the process and I'm not real fussy. There's some cute stuff out there, but I would never get a book done if I tried most of it.

Here is a side view of the layout box. It currently holds what will end up being 24 pages (12 double layouts if you will).

I also have to confess that I have two of these, complete with 30 guides each. I will often have both of them going at the same time, especially when I'm working on the girls' books simultaneously.

This post is linked to The Organizing Junkie's Monthly Organizing Round-Up.

If you haven't had enough of my scrapbooking and organizing obsession in this post and you haven't read them yet, you might be interested in these posts:

Scrapbooking — Picture Sorting and Organization
Organization — Scrapbooking Room
Memorabilia...To Keep or Not to Keep