Kitchen Junk Drawer Organization

My brownie boxes to washi tape inbox mail sorter started with my procrastinating about my wedding duties and the fact that organizing when you have more important things to do is so much fun!

I love my house and I love my kitchen. But the one problem my kitchen has is the lack of drawer storage, so that means no junk drawer! I don't have a picture, but often my counter would be over flowing with junk that had no place to go. I had a small basket on my counter full of junk and the bottom shelf of a cabinet. I did a bit of rearranging and was able to free up another shelf in my cabinet.

I found these great plastic containers from the Target dollar aisle that were black and blue. Once I spray painted them with a nice coat of chalkboard spray paint I had pretty organization.

Six of these little containers fit perfect on my shelf, but I needed to create a second shelf to hold up the top layer. Since they are not that heavy I used a piece of foam board.

I added chalk vinyl to two drawers I also found at Target for more organized storage.

I am so happy with how organized my "junk" space now is! Combine this with my DIY inbox, this upgrade only cost me $26 plus the cost of spray paint which I already had :)

Brownie Box to Washi Tape Mail Sorter

In my procrastination for my wedding duties, I decided I needed to organize my kitchen (there will be more on this later!!!) I decided I needed an inbox for bills and things that needed attention. Yes I could have gone to Target and bought one, BUT this was SUPER easy to make and really took me less than 30 minutes!

I started with 2 brownie boxes and NO plan, just a vision!

I started by cutting the top 1/3 of my box off and then cutting down the front of both sides of the box.

I then drew a diagonal line on the side of the box from the top to the bottom (see the picture on the right) to allow for the angled shape I wanted.

Fold on the line and cut off the extra little flap (Don't cut off the extra from your fold line, this is how you attach the two sides!)

Repeat this for the other side of the box.

Then, repeat the above few steps for the other box! I used the first box as a template for the second (see the image below on the left) Then to assemble, a little hot glue on the flap side, press and hold.

Glue both sides, and assemble the second box. SO easy! Then hot glue the two boxes together.

A finished, yet ugly In Box!

To decorate I used my Target Washi tape. As long as you don't look at the back.... I just applied layers of the tape until I had the design I wanted! (I changed my color from this picture to my final pictures!!) 

I used my Silhouette Cameo to cut out two fun shapes with Chalkboard vinyl! A couple Command Adhesive strips on the back and I have a new organized in-box!

It feels so much better to be organized!

Honey Lemon Sugar Hand Scrub

For Mother's Day I made some Honey Lemon Sugar Hand Scrub. It was so very easy and took all of a few minutes!

I loosely followed a recipe...
3 cups of sugar
4 lemons
1/2 Cup of Honey (or so)
Less than a cup of Olive Oil

I added the simple ingredients in the order listed above, slowly adding in the olive oil until its the desired consistency you want. I didn't want a strong olive oil smell so added in a bit extra lemon. Mix well and you are done!

I distribute them into cute mason jars, added chalk board vinyl and some ribbon and I have a simple mother's day gift. Plus I tried it out and have super soft hands!!!

Washi Tape and Silhouette Hotel Gift Bags

I finally joined the Washi Tape craze and picked some up while at Target. I am glad I did because they worked out well for decorating hotel gift bags for the wedding guests next weekend.

I started out my project by using a picture I took of my sister and her future husband a few months back for their Save the Date. I used the same method I used in the past for turning that image into a silhouette image. I then merged the silhouette image with the word love and cut it out with my Silhouette Cameo.

To decorate the bag further, I added 3 rows of cute washi tape I got from Target. I love the completed look and the pop that the washi tape adds.

Inside the hotel gift bags we included 2 bottles of water, pretzels, a tin of mints and some chocolate. We went for simple and easy this time around. 

Sunday Social

Happy Sunday Evening... I am so excited to be the featured blog tonight at the Sasse Life. Check out Kim's blog and join in the fun! Have a great week, my week is going to be busy/ fun with my younger sister's wedding this weekend!!



It's that time again! Time to get social!

How to participate:

1.  Follow your host.

2. Follow the Featured blog.

3.  Link up your blog's home page -- not a specific link or you will be deleted!
4. Visit at least 2 other blogs and make some friends!
5. Let your friends know by posting this button. The more, the merrier!

Featured Blog

Decorating the Dorchester Way

Hi! I am Angela from Decorating the Dorchester Way! I am so excited to be the featured blog this week! I left a job in event planning and marketing to be a stay at home mom to my awesome 2 year old son, so my blog is my creative outlet! I share my crafts, decorating, organizing, upholstery and most recently a few sewing projects (I am learning to sew and love it!)

My little man and my husband at the Grand Canyon a few weeks ago! (It was cold!)

Visit me at my blog or facebook 

5 Funny Facts about me:
1. In college I was a doll doctor! I worked for a major doll company in their doll hospital fixing dolls all day! (And it was a lot of fun!!!)
2. I am a few credits short of a chemistry degree, and a computer science degree and maybe one more degree but ended up with a communications degree!
3. I don't think there are enough hours in the day to get all of my crafting done. And I will gladly sacrifice cleaning for a little more crafting time.
4. I lived in the same city my whole life until we moved to Michigan for 3 years. We moved back to Wisconsin a year ago and I am so glad to be back. It made me appreciate living close to my family and in my lovely city.
5. I love pinterest a little too much and could seriously spend all day on it... or all night. Who needs to sleep! (And I have actually made a few projects I pinned!!)

Time to get social!

Baby Monthly Onesies with Printable

This is a really old project for me since Little Man is 2! But these monthly baby onesies are all over the web, so I thought I would share my version! Now that little man is 2, it is so awesome to look back at these pictures and these really cute baby bodysuits! My awesome fabulous friend put my vision of these shirts to life by creating the graphics for me. Using the iron on transfer printer paper these are so easy to make (just make sure you print them in reverse!!!!) Besides that a piece of cake!

Look at how cute little man looks! And how much he changed from 1 month to 3 months and then 7! If I have a suggestion for creating these for your self... make them all before baby comes. I did not, and it felt like each month I was scrambling on his month birthday or a few days later to create that month's birthday onesie!

I love the simple green and brown colors. Since little man's nursery was done in Restoration Hardware's Silver Sage this green color is based on Silver Sage! ( I still LOVE LOVE LOVE this color!!!) So because they are green and brown, they could go for either a boy or a girl!!!!

Download the PDF files that I used to create my month onesie here!!! Feel free to use them to create your own month onesie or for a friend. Please make sure to give credit back to my blog!

Baby month bodysuit 1 - 6
Baby month bodysuit 7-8
Baby month bodysuit 9-10
Baby month bodysuit 11 - 12

My Data Dilemma

Sorry this is yet again another not a DIY post!

 I am having a dilemma with data storage and data backing up.   

A month or so ago my laptop started acting up even though it was only about a year old. It was so slow that I could not do a single thing. So after a few frustrated weeks I sent the computer off to my fabulous IT brother-in-law who gave me the annoying sad news that my hard drive was shot. Like I said my laptop was only a year old!

My BIL gave me a few options on new hard drives and I ended up going with a solid state hard drive. Traditional hard drives have moving parts, these new solid state ones do not. No moving parts = nothing to break and with a toddler who may like my laptop this is a good thing!! My old hard drive had a HUGE amount of storage (Like 500 GBs) so that meant I could store TONS and TONS and TONS of pictures from my DSLR on my computer. My new hard drive is only 128 GB which is way less space than my old hard drive already had on it... meaning I can no longer store my pictures on my laptop.

SOOOOO

I have an external hard drive and was some what diligent about backing up my data.... I had my data backed up until 2011, so I would not have really lost all that much. But lucikly my BIL was able to get my data off of my hard drive before he replaced it!!!! MORAL OF THE STORY: Back up your data!!!!! I just backed up everything onto my external hard drive. So all over 2012 is on there now as well.....

But..... I should really have a second copy of this very important data. Question for everyone how do you back up your data? I am looking at buying another external hard drive or joining the cloud :) Obviously there are pros and cons to both.

My BIL also suggested I go through my hundreds of GBs of photos and delete some of them. I mean I could easily delete half of the images... but let's be honest this will take me years!!!! I mean I can't decided between 20 of the same pictures trying to decide which one or two to keep.... (I think I need to hire an intern to delete pictures for me..... ) To give you an idea on how many pictures I have, for Little Man's first year I saved my photos by month and each month has AT least 1,200 pictures in it.

I mean how do you decide to delete even one picture from the six below.... each one is a different cute expression!!!





SOOOO

How do you decide which pictures to keep? and keep the number of pictures under control that you save?

How often do you back up your files?

How many copies do  you keep and how do you keep them?