Craft and School Supply Organization

If you don’t already follow her, I’d love to introduce you to Kathy of Cornerstone Confessions.  I invited Kathy to guest post on Organizing Homelife today to share how she organized her craft and school supply cabinet.  Kathy shares homeschooling tips and organization, printables, blogging tips, and much more.  I hope you’ll hop over and visit her!

Our first school year at home is quickly coming to a close. We have loved using our school room we organized last Spring but there is one space in our school room I never got around to–our craft and school supply cabinet. You know the saying “failure to plan is planning to fail?” That quote is usually used to refer to goal setting but it could also easily be used to describe organization. When you fail to plan where you are going to put things, you are planning on failing when it comes to putting things away. That describes our former craft cabinet to a T. As the year wore on, the cabinet went from bad to worse until it looked like this…

Our supplies became lost inside miscellaneous net bins. I had no idea what we really had so I often ended up buying more supplies instead of using what we already owned because I didn’t want to go through the hassle of dumping everything out of the bins for one glue stick. Yes, it was definitely time for an overhaul.

To begin, I emptied everything out onto the floor. I then sorted through the supplies we had, formed supply piles and counted how many containers I might need. While I usually try to use containers and storage options I have around the house for my organization projects, this particular project needed some uniformity to minimize the chaos. Translation–it was time for a visit to the Dollar Tree–my second home for totally cute and cheap organization storage options. For this product I chose to use some of their colorful locking food storage containers, as they were the right size for most of my supplies and easily stackable. For the larger supplies I also grabbed a few color matching plastic shoe boxes. Already, the cabinet was beginning to look much more eye appealing.

Yet no organization project is complete without labels so I went to DigiScrapDepot where I found some cute free digiscrap from NumbBumm for making my labels. I laminated them using my Scotch Laminator and then adhered them to the storage containers with packing tape.

Now I can easily find the supplies I am looking for and I even have a few extra storage containers stored at the back of the top shelf ready for additional supplies in the future so that I’m not left without a plan!

And our only net bin is for the storage of our small balls and frisbees…a much more appropriate use.

I love a finished organization project. Don’t you? It just makes me all joyful inside…to the point that I just want to open and close the cabinet doors again and again to bask in the completion. I know. I’m a little crazy like that. 😉 So, what latest project have you been working on to help you plan where you’ll put your things?

Kathy Gossen is a developing domestic diva drawing on the divine who writes about her domestic adventures on Cornerstone Confessions. She’s a child of God, a wife, a homeschool mom of two, a daughter, a friend, a sister, an undercover organizer, a musician and an aspiring techie who is learning what it means to apply God’s Word in the everyday. She prays her life song sings of her love for her Lord and hopes to encourage others along the way.