For the Love of Baskets

There's a rule in this house. You can never have too many baskets. Nope. Absolutely not. There's always a need for them, especially with a 2 year old running around and 50,000 toys. 50,000 toys that, of course, have to be organized by type, color and purpose because I might be a little OCD... only a little... no way I'll be able to sleep knowing that Batman is sitting in the same bin as the tools.

Surely, I'm not the only multi-tasking mom that has a disaster of a medicine cabinet. If your's is immaculate, I applaud you, I really do; but lets just pretend, it makes me feel a little better. :) I've noticed, this is one of the worst places in our house to get messy so quickly. Mainly because when I'm rummaging for migraine medicine, putting anything back in the right spot is the very last thing I care about. Then something falls and there's a cascade of pill bottles everywhere... that's usually the sign of defeat for the day. 

Finally, I had enough and cleared all this junk out.

Ridiculous isn't it? Any of my OCDers cringing inside?

So what on earth could I use? I turned to my "storage closet" as I call it, probably more accurately called a "junk closet". I found two small canvas baskets I had gotten from Wal-mart a few years ago. So I went through and trashed the expired stuff we obviously wouldn't be using and sorted through it all. I finally got it cleared out and minimized to this.

Any reason to pull out the label maker! Here's a side by side.

This little purge sent me onto another purge, the pantry. It was originally 100x worse, shew! I'll fill you in on that one shortly as well. A little teaser for my fellow organizing freaks... it involves Target and canvas totes :)

Remodeled Dining Buffet

First of all, if my grandmother reads this, she will absolutely hang me. She had given me this old dining buffet with a hutch which is beautiful. However,  it just needed to be updated just a smigin to this era. That's a proper form of measurement right?

We don't currently have a dining room table, but within the next few years, I'll find a way to convince hubby that it's not just a waste of space.

So this is what I started out with...

I recently unloaded the car so it's quite a mess. Note to self - Clean the house.

Since this piece of furniture was real wood and still in great condition, I decided to prime it up before painting. I took drawers, doors and screws out and patched all the holes. I think primed every part that I was going to paint.

After making a few modifications and about 2 coats of black paint, this is what it turned out to be. I'm very happy with it. Now I'm working on making baskets of some sort to put on the shelves. They're just dying for some attention.

{After}

{Before}

I think it looks great and will work just as well with a dining room set when we decide to get one. 

Just to follow up; here are a few painting furniture tips...

1. Before painting, sand down the furniture. This allows for the paint to adhere better and gives a fresh surface.

2. Priming before you paint can be pretty important. If you don't, the paint will not stick and will just peel right off especially with laminate. I suggest having your primer tinted if working with dark colors.

3. Make sure you put enough coats on and get in the little crevices. I use a roller and then a regular paint brush to get into the small spots.

4. Let it dry! : ) I know I have a problem with this and when I let my excitement get the best of me, I later pay for it and have to remove paint from something or repaint a certain area.

Corkboard Cabinet Door

Not sure about you guys, but loose papers like take out menus, coupons, phone numbers, intructions (Anything!!) hanging out on my fridge drives me nuts : ). And you always get those heavy pieces that regardless what magnet or how many of them you use, it still slides to the bottom. Am I right? So of course, my wheels started turning with ideas. Ironically while I was at work one day cleaning out a spare office, I came across a spare corkboard so I thought, hmm I'll just take it home and cut it out.... Didn't work.... Why? : ) because it didn't dawn on me that it might be glued... duh Ashley.

Lesson learned. So I made a trip to walmart and they have a pack of 4 12x12 corkboard pieces that didn't cost much.

I laid out the pieces how they'd be placed inside the cabinet door and marked where they needed to be cut.

I got all of my pieces put together and put some glue on the back. The set comes with square foam sticky pads to go on the back, but they've never worked for me and I have no intention of taking this down for a long time. So I used tacky glue and then a little gorilla clue.

I finally got all the pieces up and let it dry.

: ) I'm sure it'll be cluttered in no time.

{5 Minute Cabinet Makeover}

Don't believe me? I promise it's really not that hard. All I did was pick a cabinet, undo the screws and then strategically placed a few things. : )

I've always liked the idea of the open cubies with cute baskets; didn't matter where, the kitchen, office, living room, anywhere. Normally kitchen cabinets are a little too wide for this, but I've got this one weird kitchen cabinet over in the corner that hasn't been used ONCE since the day we've moved in.... wait, that's a lie, I did store stuff in it the day we moved in and it's been there ever since. : )

So here's the picture of the cabinet before...

I don't know about you guys, but we've got a Keurig coffee maker and having thousands of those little K-cups lingering around drives me mad. For Christmas we got a 60 variety pack.... what!? 60!, yes!.... and I don't know what on earth to do with them all. The box just takes up space in my pantry so this new little idea I have is coming quite handy. One cute basket please!

Big box to a cute basket get up... hehe

So I decided instead of having my loose recipe books, cards and print offs scattered around on my countertops or end up getting misplaced somewhere else, my new little cubbies would be peeeeeerfect. I'm pretty pleased with the outcome. Just trying to decide if I should paint the inside of the "cabinet". Here's the after picture, let me know if you like it!

Thanks for visiting!