Wednesday 15 February 2012

Organising - Study Desk Drawers (Part 1)

Carrying on with the reorganisation of the study, here is some detail on the organisation of my desk drawers.

Oh, just to wander off on a tangent for a second - the stationery drawer in the study contains the majority of our stationery items in the house, but we do also have a couple of other stationery homes too. I find that its best to keep items where you're going to use them, so e.g.
  • In the kitchen I have a pot of pens, letter opener and memo cube as I often open and deal with mail in the kitchen and I don't want to trail to the study every time to get supplies to write a note or open a letter.
  • Hubs uses the dining room as his office and since we've finally got the unit built in there, I've stocked him up with some everyday stationery supplies, again so he doesn't have to go hunting for sellotape, pens, etc, etc.
  • I keep a notepad and pen in my bedside drawer in case I have something to write down when I'm in bed - who wants to get up in the middle of the night to look for a pen and paper (if I don't write it down I find I completely forget by the next morning!
Back the post...

The first drawer is the one that contains all our stationery:


At the moment it doesn't look very pretty (and apologies for the lighting in the pic, I took it at night and the flash has created a lot of glare) so I'm thinking of ways I can make it look nicer - there's a lot of visual clutter going on, so maybe I need to cover the lids of some of the boxes? I've pinned a few things onto my Ideas - Stationery board on Pinterest (love Pinterest!) and would ideally like all my stationery items such as stapler, hole punch etc to be white, but I can't really justifying buying all new just because the colours don't match!! Plus any new stuff might not fit in the drawers as well as the existing stuff and I'd need to reorganise!!

I got quite a lot of the stationery when I was going through a pink/purple phase - can you tell???

Storage Containers: I'm all for cheap organising and like to think of new ways to use things like packaging that would otherwise just get thrown out, so I've upcycled the following:

Various sizes of Ferrero Rocher - I think there's 10! (and I hate Ferrero Rocher lol - get them from my Mum); small plastic boxes Hubs' business cards came in (unfortunately he doesn't get these boxes any more, which is a shame as they are really useful!); A4 acrylic paper box and lid (they work really well to hold all the items in place).

Guided tour of the drawer front to back:

Front Row Top L-R: Bulldog Clips, Paperclips, Pins, Staples.
Front Row Bottom L-R: BluTac, Media Storage, Mobile Phone Accessories.
2nd Row L-R: Business Card Holder, Calculator, Hole Punch, Magic Tape, Super Clear Tape, Mini Tape Dispenser, x2 Post-It Note Dispensers & Mini Memo Cube.
3rd Row L-R: Mini Notebook, Labels, Memo Cube, Box contains Small Notebooks, Lid contains Tippex, Highlighter, Mini Post-its, Eraser, USB Memory Stick (not shown) & Pens.
4th Row L-R: Mini Notebook, Screen Wipes, Bach Remedies, Return Address Labels, Tealight Holder, iPod Dock, Staple Remover, Stapler, Scissors; Box containing various including Dry Wipe Marker, Pencils, Booklight, Lip Balm...
5th Row L-R (sorry not shown in pic properly): more small stationery items that are rarely used (mainly spares).

Where possible I always try to make sure that the storage containers used fit the space as best as possible, so that there is little movement and also so that there is as little wasted/unused space as possible (I might post about my Golden Rules for Storage another day!).

Part Two coming up!

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