Organize Your Christmas Cards in 2015!

Wanted to post a reminder about my Christmas Card Book Covers! In 2012, I posted instructions on how to create your books once you've ordered your covers, but just wanted to post some updated photos and a little reminder of how to create your books here.

First stack up all your cards. Then take 2 or 3 at a time and hole punch them using 2 holes of a 3 hole puncher.

After you've done that, take a few minutes to ooh and aww over your friends cute families. :)

Then put your book together using binder rings that you can purchase at office supply stores or even grocery stores. 

I like to put our family Christmas card as the first card in my books! 

That's pretty much it. Pretty simple. If you want to ensure that your covers last, feel free to laminate them yourself. I've had some of my covers for a few years now though & they are fine! Its up to you.

I love having all of my Christmas cards in organized books to display each Christmas season or flip through when I want to go down memory lane. 

Order yours today in my Etsy shop. If you want to order more than 5, send me an email (eleanorboynton@gmail.com) or Etsy message and I'll get a reserved listing set up for you to purchase. Let me know if you have any questions! 

Happy 2015!

Eleanor

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!)

Office Organizing: Vintage Ideas

I love these ideas for adding vintage touches when organizing... not only is repurposing vintage items cute & different - but its cheaper! yay!

They have a million of these old coke can boxes at Canton... great idea for storing just about any craft supply!

Image via bhg

Image via bhg

Image via country living

Image via bhg

Love this idea of converting an old suitcase into the perfect storage place for crafting materials! And its portable too!

Image via bhg

And genniuusss... you can stack them & label them with cute gift tags (that look like luggage tags! presh).

Image via bhg

Our Home: Spicing Things Up!

Soo recently I became just way too irritated with our spice cabinet. It was pretty gross... spice jars would tip over and not be closed all the way which would create a lovely fine layer of spices all over the shelves. This meant little spices constantly falling on my countertop, which would mean cleaning. And lets face it, I do whatever I can to avoid cleaning, soooo I got some new spice racks that have finally saved me from this MISSERRY! i think i might be feeling dramatic today. anyhoo - here are some pics!

The spice racks are from Ikea & I labeled each of them using my stickers from the West Elm sale table! If you don't recall, these stickers made their fancy debut in the post where we aired our dirty laundry.

Why do I feel the need to make my spice jars pretty? I really don't know... but I can't deny that I sometimes crack a smile when I open my pantry cabinet door & see those cute little stickers. haha loser - thats me!

Have a spicyyyy weekend! hahaa & dont hate me for my play on words - i cant help it!

Our Home: Airing Our Dirty Laundry!

Yes thats right, today you get to see our dirty laundry.... I think Peter might kill me for this one!

So here's the situation regarding our new laundry baskets-

Before:

Peter's dirty clothes = in a hamper on the floor of our bedroom (quite annoying)

My dirty clothes = piled (usually way too high) in the bathroom cabinet you'll see below

After:

Both of our laundry = neatly organized in 3 baskets that all fit in one cabinet!

We typically each do our own laundry (I know, worst wife ever & best husband ever), so the system works perfectly for us. Whenever my colors basket gets full, I do my colors... same for Peter with his. Whenever the whites are full, whoever wants whites badly enough does the whites! Super easy & keeps us from letting our laundry get piled up for way too long.

I used little stickers from West Elm (found them on the clearance table!) & printed the labels on each sticker. Then I just used some clear packing tape to protect the stickers - a little ghetto but I knew I'd be thankful later.

Oh and the baskets are Sorting Hampers from The Container Store... They were $8 each and they clip together if you want them to. Looovely. Organized. Easier. Cuter. woohoo!

Pegboards + Me = Love

Not only do I love the way pegboards look, I loooove what they do. They organize like crazy & give everything a specific place... a home if you will. Never again will you find yourself holding a miscellaneous tool wondering where you should put it... nope... cause it will have a home. And when you look at your pegboard, its home will be the only empty spot on the board, waiting for its little tool to come back where it belongs.

Ok this is getting weird... but do you get it?! Pegboards are great. Here are some of my favs I've found online!

photo via martha stewart

photo via martha stewart

photo via martha stewart

photo via bhg

photo via real simple

photo via martha stewart

photo via martha stewart

photo via real simple

photo via martha stewart

photo via real simple

Be on the lookout for an upcoming post with the pictures of my new office closet redo - an organization wonnnderrland complete with big, wonderful pegboard! :)

Our Home: Guest Room/Linen Closet Redo!

It may have been a while since I've posted, but it's cause I've been organizing like crazy! One of my goals for the new year was to organize/simplify my life... I have been sooo tired of not being able to find things due to clutter for so long, and I decided it was finally time I do something about it!

First up, our guest room closet that also doubles as a linen & other random things storage closet. Before the redo, this closet was nothing but a space piled high with stuff that couldn't be seen or found... & if you did manage to find something, it was wrinkled or broken due to the mess.

Now it's an organized little beauty!

I used plain white gift boxes (CVS babyyy) on the new top shelves to store things that we want to keep but that don't really go in a file cabinet... random things like old letters & notes, ticket stubs, product how-to booklets, etc. I labeled them using little metal book plates, kraft paper, and pink brads.

White storage cubes from Target - kind of annoying to put together, but super cheap & worth it to me! I hot glued mini-clothespins to each cube to attach the circle labels. Ooh the joy of being able to actually see the stuff I have!

Just enough room for guests to hang clothes!

Hope you like the new closet! Practical & useful, yet still a little cute... woohoo!