What up, y'all? Today's post is about some veeeery cheap organization. Back in the early days, I shared our closet system.
It's a large customizable unit, and the first thing we did was adjust the height of the shelves to work for us. Rather than keep an 18" high shelf to store shoes, for example, we shortened the distance between all the shelves and came up with one that was the perfect height for some wicker-like baskets that hold my belts and scarves.
And it was the perfect size to hold all my prepping equipment. You know: Makeup, hair dryer, curling iron. That stuff. I considered buying a wide, shallow basket to corral that stuff, but we're renting this place, and its closet unit, short term. If I could do it without buying anything, that was my goal.
Happily, we came across a box that was the perfect size for this little spot. It had held a window fan, so I cut off one long side, taped the opened side together and threw all my stuff in there to see if it fit. It did.
It's really pretty, right? Nothing a covering for the outside and some organization on the inside couldn't fix. I could have covered the box with any nature of things, but since we already had some natural-toned baskets in the closet, I thought I'd look in that direction. I bought a roll of wood grain contact paper at the dollar store for $1.50. Organization wise, I looked to my stash of berry containers. We go through a lot of berry containers, and I love them as drawer organizers because they're clear and they come in a bunch of shapes and sizes. Finally, I rummaged around in my paper stash for some paper to line the bottom of the box.
It was pretty easy after that. I covered the box with contact paper, inside and out. I initially lined the bottom of the box with the paper you see above, but then I went with a scrap of wrapping paper that had more white in it. It's chevron, too, which I know must finally, actually, be on its way out, so I thought it was good to use it up.
I cut the tops off all my berry containers, and, where necessary, trimmed their outer corners a bit to keep things neat. Then I put it all back together, by type, thusly:
Working roughly clockwise, we have hair products, hair tools, hair bands, stuff to make me smell good, eye liner and mascara, eye shadow, face (tinted moisturizer, concealer and sunscreen), and lips.
When I was putting this all back together, I thought that it seems like a lot of goods to store for a bimonthly black eyeliner binge. But that's not really fair. Though I'm not really a daily makeup wearer, I do have a lot of fun with makeup when it's time to do something other than grocery shop - and this is all stuff I do, at least sometimes, use. Plus, it's pretty trimmed down from previous stashes. My mom worked in the cosmetics department of a department store for a while, and my sisters and I were beneficiaries in a big way.
Your, um, toilette (say it twa-let and it's better) is a pretty personal thing -- you might have enough makeup to fill a room (cough, Mom, cough), or a single tube of mascara (cough, AC, cough), or not a single thing. But if you need a place to store it all, consider pretty paper you've got on hand and hoarding plastic fruit containers for a while. I spent $1.50 on the contact paper, and those oblong plastic containers at the bottom of the box are actually Command boxes, meant to hang up on hooks, that I got for $3.50 each on clearance (Target. Of course). Everything else was free. So, I spent $8.50 on a system that really works for me. How do I know it works? Because it still looks roughly like this, after months of use. And the "pretty" label on the outside sums it up pretty neatly for me.
Yes, if we were staying longer, I'd invest in a system that didn't have obvious air bubbles.
Hope your week is going great!
What do you do to corral your primping materials?