Organizing A Stationery Cupboard & Why You Should Have One...

Hi honeys
I hope you're well and having a great week.  I thought I'd share our latest organizing project, which is far from finished, but I'm actually rather excited about it :)

If you look around your room right now you'll probably see pens? notebooks? A stray pair of scissors that normally live in the kitchen drawer because... well, where else would they go?

What about a designated stationery cupboard? Or a cubby or shelf or box, whatever suits your needs honeys, but somewhere to keep pens, paper, craft supplies and all of those bits and pieces that sit on surfaces around your home causing clutter.  

The purpose behind every organizing project we start is basically the same, isn't it?  To get rid of unwanted clutter, and to sort and find a home for whatever's left, a place for everything, and everything in its place?

When chatting to Hubby recently I said that everything we keep while de-cluttering really should have a place to go. Not just in the short term, an actual, designated, permanent home for that item.  When (although it's still feeling more like if on slightly depressed days) we finish organizing our home, the plan is to be able to immediately walk to any item and pick it up when it's needed. No more spending a whole evening looking for that particular receipt, or trying to jot down a message or phone number and not being able to find a pen.  This latest project, setting up a designated stationery cupboard, is the latest step towards that goal.

Do you remember the plans I drew out for Hubby's den/man cave honeys? The cupboard we're using to corral our household stationery is the one we called zone one. 

It's very much a work in progress, but so far it looks like this......

Obviously it's going to change as more items are added as we find them around the house, but so far there is ........

Starting on the top left hand side of the shelf:
1. A lidded A4 box containing extra printer paper.
2.  Sitting on top is a small lidded box containing rolls of Sellotape.
3. Next to the small lidded box is a blue tin box. This is home to our furbaby Jade's paperwork, such as her booklet to log her yearly inoculation boosters & her microchip information.
4. Assorted coloured pens & pencils that haven't been unpackaged and filed away yet :)
5. Do you remember this little drawer unit honeys?  You've seen another the same its downstairs in our kitchen cabinet under the sink.  I adore that little drawer unit! It's still there, keeping under our sink neat & tidy by being home to assorted little kitchen things such as Brillo pads to clean pots & small bottles of Zoflora (floral scented disinfectant.) This little drawer unit used to live in our bedroom, where it stored my make up, but that's been given a new home and now these little drawers are home to lots of brightly coloured pencils.....

The next drawer has pens, with the drawer below it having paper/craft glue and a few Pritt sticks, for card making and scrapbooking. I got these little drawer units from Home Bargains for £3.99 each but I know that Asda (Walmart) also has them too.

The base of the small cupboard has the following items:
1. A magazine file containing packs of laminating sheets for our laminator.
2. A magazine file which is currently home to a pack of A4 sheets of card for card making and assorted notebooks, I adore notebooks :)
3. A container currently containing a small glass jar of ink pen re-fill cartridges, 2 cans of spray mount, which is a type of adhesive for crafting, and last but not least is a jar of pretty blue sand from Ikea.  You might have seen this blue sand in a glass on my dressing table, where I use it to support my make up brushes.
4. This is a box containing a dragon.  Wow, that was quite a statement, wasn't it honeys :)  It's a beautiful dragon ornament and it's not going to stay in our stationery cupboard to guard it or anything (although that's kinda a cute idea :) but he's napping in his box right now until Hubby's den/man cave is finished, then he'll be allowed to escape from his box and be found a happy home on a shelf :)

There are lots of things that will find a home in this cupboard, we have a few staplers, lots of notebooks, parcel tape, mailing envelopes, small letter sized envelopes, etc etc.  Eventually this little cupboard will be re-organized again to make room for all of these things but this feels like a good start for now :)

Am I late to the party honeys? Does everyone already have a stationery cupboard?  I'm loving having a place to bring extra stationery supplies and put them away :) Does anyone have any thoughts? Have you set up a stationery cupboard or shelf or corner? If so, do share?  Till next time dear ones, sending heaps of hugs always xx