Junk Cabinet Organizing on a Budget!

Sooo its time for another post where I embarrass myself with a "before" photo that shows off just how disgusting I really am deep down. This time its our junk cabinet -- the cabinet in between our kitchen and tv room that contains pretty much 2 types of items -- weird, rarely used home items or benson's belongings. Feel free to judge me, cause I'm judging me just looking at the picture again...

For some reason January has become organizing month in my head, so when it rolled around, I decided this grosssss cabinet was first priority, but knew I couldnt really spend more than a few dollars to get this baby organized. Challenge acceppptedddd. (how i met your mother reference.. anyone get it? no? im the only one who still loves that show?? oh well).

So to start, I took everything out of the cabinet & got rid of what i could & categorized what was left over. Then I gathered some bins I had around the house that weren't being used and made a beloved trip to the Dollar Tree to get whatever else I needed. (love you $tree!).

I gave everything that needed to be in the cabinet a home of sort in either a bin, basket, or tupperware container & after adding some perhaps over-the-top homemade labels to the mix, my lovely little organized masterpiece was complete!  

You can actually see whats in there now, wahooo! Just hoping it stays this way! 

Oh & here are a couple of pics of the countertop below the cabinet.. I cleaned it off & made it a little cuter at some point during the cabinet organizing process! 

Alright thats all for now... hope you are inspired to do some January organizing!! 

DIY Christmas Card Books

This Christmas my sister-in-law asked if I had any ideas on good ways to store/display/organize the many Christmas cards we receive each year. I didn't have any ideas at the time, but love me a good challenge so I started hunting for ideas! We wanted something cute, but that would be easy to do year after year. I googled and pinterested around and couldn't find much until my mom forwarded me a blog post one day with the great idea to make books for each year of christmas cards. I loved the idea & it seemed simple enough, so I created some covers and made my own version for my 3 years of cards... I'm in love!!

Once I tested things out and decided this was the way to go, I emailed my sister-in-law with the instructions and she began making her books.. Her house has lots of clean, pretty neutrals, so we decided to go that route for her covers and I think they turned out so cute! 

So many years of xmas cards with cute family pics to look at -- love it! 

As for instructions on making the books, it's really pretty simple.

1. Print your own 5x7 covers for each year on card stock or purchase them from me (see details & pricing at the bottom of this post!)

2. Stack your cover and cards as neatly as you can, turning vertical cards in the same direction.

3. Using 2 punchers of a 3 hole punch, make 2 holes in the top center of your cards.. I did 2 or 3 cards at a time, but I suppose you could do more if you have a fancy-schmancy hole punch. 

4. Use binder rings to hook your cards together (mine are the 1" size but you might need larger ones if you have more friends than me :) -- you can find the rings at office stores and I even saw them at kroger) 

**A good idea is to put your family christmas card as the first card after the cover for each year...

Once you're finished, you'll have lots of cute books to have out during the holiday season! There are many ways to display them. You could hang them on a wall...

Or display them in a cute basket...  whatever works best for you!

Hope this inspires many of you to start saving your christmas cards or if you're like me, to get them out of the dusty storage closet & into cute, organized books that can be displayed year after year! 

**As I said above, my christmas card book covers are available to purchase! 

Here are the details:

Choose between red & green or neutral. Fonts will be as shown in the photos of my sister-in-law's books (above). There are 9 fonts used that will repeat themselves throughout the years. Covers are printed on smooth white 100 lb cover stock. ***ALL PAST AND FUTURE YEARS ARE AVAILABLE!! I can go as far into the future as you'd like! :) Email me at eleanorboynton@gmail.com with the years and colors you would like and I will send you a paypal invoice to make your payment. 

Cover Pricing

1 to 5 covers - $3 each

6 to 15 covers - $2.50 each

16+ covers - $2 each

***US Shipping is $2 regardless of how many covers ordered

Please let me know if you have any questions! --Eleanor (Oh Louise!)