Paper Castle

Archive for the ‘Storage Organization’ Category

Hi everyone. It’s been quite a while since I last blogged.  I was laid up for a week with a nasty cold and even nastier laryngitis and then I was working on my craft room makeover.

Read more »

After many requests for a tutorial for this project, I managed to get one put together for you.  If you think you can’t possibly make one of these, you are completely wrong.  I’m going to show you how easy it is.

Read more »

I’m still on a foam board kick.  This time I’ve repurposed a foam board project from a couple of years back.

When I look at this now, it’s kind of funny.  I thought I had a lot of punches and needed a special storage unit for my wealth of punches.  All 21 of them!  Isn’t THAT hilarious?!  ROFL!!!

Read more »

Hello everyone.  Well, I don’t know about you, but my crafty space is never 100% what I want it to be.  I’m forever organizing and reorganizing.  Lately, if necessary I build things in order to get what I want.

So, what do you do when you run out of things and places to put things?  You go trolling around the house for things to repurpose!  That part can get a bit tricky because if you find something really big, like say a bookcase, someone might notice that it’s suddenly missing!

This time I repurposed something from the garage.  I was just bringing it back in the house where it belonged anyway.  It used to up on the 2nd floor in my husbands home office but I was thinking it’s better to carry something DOWN the stairs then UP.  YAY!  I win!  My room is DOWN!

So . . I have this bookcase downstairs, now what. I had thought it’d be perfect for storing my stamp CD cases.  It turns out that the bookcase is nearly 2 feet deep!  How deep is a CD case?  Well, I didn’t measure it, but I’m know it’s not 2 feet! LOL

I wasn’t smart enough to take a picture of my bookcase before I did anything to it, so here is a picture of one similar that’s empty.

Now, the problem with this is that it looks pretty, but has severe limitations.  My bookcase is about 7 feet tall, 3 feet wide and 2 feet deep.  It has only 3 shelves.  Three shelves for 7 feet?!  Do you see where this is going?  That’s a lot of wasted space right?

So, off to the power tool room I went and started thinking up ways to maximize this newfound storage unit.  What I ended up with was a stepped approach.  It isn’t pretty but I’ve effectively tripled the useable space in my bookcase.

I now have 3 shelves in one. You can see where the “measure twice . . . cut once” rule might have been useful.  But I was in a hurry!  I wanted it done right how!  lol

I used 1/8” chipboard that I got at the Home Depot and 2” x 4” pieces for supports in behind.  Easy peasy!

Now all my stamps are on a single shelf!  Prior to this they were in a few different places because no single place was big enough to accommodate them all. Not like I have a bazillion of them either. Now I have room for as many as I could ever possibly want or need!

See, they’re already starting to creep onto the next shelf and I have a whole bucket of stamps that have been waiting for indexing.  I might have enough to fill up the bottom row here. 

I find this is also a perfect place to store those bottley things and keep them visible at the same time.

Strangely enough, I have 2 empty shelves with nothing to put on them . . . . yet.   In the fullness of time . . . .

So, although it’s not the prettiest, it does seem to be very functional and a great solution for getting the best use out of limited space.

I hope this has been helpful for some.  Now, go dig out those power tools!

Hello my invisible friends!  It’s been a while huh?  I have been busy moving my studio.  Last summer I had moved to the other half of the basement as we were trying to sell our home and our agent suggested that I try to make my studio look like a rec room.  *GASP*   I had to move to a smaller space!  That meant packing up most of my stuff and moving it into the garage.

Read more »