Organization-The Blueprint for Success!

Howdy folks and welcome to the blog hop!  If you get lost along the way feel free to drop by The Club Scrap Blog to catch up on anything you might have missed.

I've been on vacation and am playing catch up here at home and at work but I couldn't miss out on the blog hop so keep your hands and arms inside the blog at all times.  There will possibly be eating, drinking and flash photography on the blog today, but please no smoking!  (Sorry I told you I'd been on vacation?)

Instead of a fancy project (come on you didn't think I would actually make something did you??) I'd like to take a few moments to discuss something near and dear to all of our hearts...organization in the crafting room.  I know I know, you probably don't need any help with this right?

 Your room doesn't look like this?

You don't have buckets of unfinished junk everywhere like this do you?

I don't know about you but my supplies are busting at the seams so I wanted to go over a couple ideas for organization because...

Let's start with kits.  I keep my kits in 12x12 plastic folders.  Each folder easily holds one regular kit, one lite kit and one stamp kit.  Not that I would know but it might also hold an extra full paper pack from the regular kit as well.  As you can see by one of the above photos I had run out of space for the actual folders so I purchased some new shelving units to go in the spare bedroom (aka the cat's room.)  I purchased a Kallax shelving unit from IKEA.  These used to be called XPEDIT units and are basically the same inside dimensions.  They come in a 1x4, 2x4, 4x4 and 5x5 cube size.  In this situation I ended up with a 4x4 cube (around $80) which I was able to assemble myself.  Just a note, try to put it together in the room you want to use it in.

Have someone help you stand it up as they are sturdy (aka heavy.)  Also PLEASE anchor it to the wall.  I don't need anyone coming back to me and saying that they had one fall on them and crush an important body part.  Here is mine finished and I purchased 3 ea $5 "basket" inserts.  (I wish I had bought a couple more.)

Please excuse the litter box, I told you it was the cat's room!  So now you have your finished new storage area.

Each of the cubes can hold around 12-14 folders (even more if you don't have all three monthly kits in each folder.)  So that means each cube basically holds a year of kits, including a special release or two.

I also have some of my kits in older wire cube storage which I do still use but if you go this route make sure you zip-tie every SINGLE connection.  I'm not kidding here.  You don't want to know what it looks or sounds like to have one of these puppies collapse in the middle of the night dumping about 8 years worth of kits on the ground.  Not that I would know.

So now you have organized and packed up all your kits.  Now let's discuss these little babies...

Call em POPs, call em HPOPs, we love em!  And We (I'm using the royal We here) have a TON of them.  I started to do some calculating but once I hit 300 POPs I quit counting.  So I have a couple of suggestions for you.  First off you can use an insert in one of your new cubes to hold a good many of them like this.  I keep my most recent ones here for easy access.

I also like the old over the door shoe organizers for some of my older POPs which I store at another house.  (yeah I know I have issues)

My current craft loft doesn't have any doors though so it's a tough spot for storage.  I also don't have a closet but if you do you can use these closet shoe holders for POPs as well (including the older strip type that we used to have.)

Finally I have a good many POPs in some storage holders called "Shoes Under"  Now these work well under the bed for storage but are fairly hard to get out and carry to the other room to use.  I actually have to get help to carry one around because they are "floppy" not sturdy.

So now you have a place for your POPs!  Next up we have the Greetings to Go.  I actually just started trimming, scoring, folding my GTG and storing them in another one of the cubes.  Ok so I scored and folded one of them.  The rest are a work in progress.

Here is my new cube system mostly filled up in the spare room...I left a couple non-craft cubes for things like cat supplies, and our poker stash.

I also use a similar 2x4 cube upstairs to store albums and ALSB pages waiting for photos.

I hope some of these ideas will help you save your craft space, I know I have a hard time creating when I'm surrounded by chaos and...

Looks like a have a couple cubes left empty, time to go buy some more supplies!!  I hope you enjoyed this little blog today and before I forget...

AJ approves of this month's kit!

Hop on over to Tiare's Blog for the next stop today and everybody keep on hoarding...I mean...crafting!!