Tag: Organization

Pretty Toy Storage

Thank you for all of your cute basket suggestions! I went with plastic lace baskets for toy storage. I had completely forgotten about them, but they were all over the design blogs when they first came out as the Carrie bike baskets. Victoria uses one for file storage, Joy has one for scraps in her studio, and now I can tell you that they also make excellent little toy bins.

p.s. Have I ever mentioned how much I love my vintage side tables? They’re the best. They hold remotes in the drawers, magazines and the new toy baskets underneath, and they have ample surface space up top. And they were only $10 each.

December 19, 2009
Seen Any Cute Baskets Lately?

Eleanor is starting to accumulate a lot of toys, and with Christmas coming she’ll be getting more. Since our home doesn’t have a family room or den, we spend most of our time together in the living room and we keep some toys there. I’ve been looking for a couple of baskets to fit under the side tables for storage, but I haven’t had much luck. I keep stupidly bringing baskets home that don’t actually fit… See, I hadn’t actually measured the openings until today. That might have helped, eh?

So far I’ve tried the LIDAN basket from IKEA, and the Underbed Storage basket from west elm. The IKEA basket was too tall so we’re using it as a toy bin next to a chair in the living room. I like that it collapses and sort of looks like it was knitted, but Brandon thinks it look old ladyish. He hates it! The west elm basket is really nice (and I think Brandon likes it), but it’s too wide. I stuck one under the coffee table for now, but I can’t decide if it looks OK under there or if I should just return it.

I need something no bigger than 13.5″W x 10″H x 24″D, and not too country/casual. Any suggestions?

December 11, 2009
Needs Assembly

The great CD/DVD Organization of 2009 has begun. I have built the frames for two of these so far, but we may go with three.

October 8, 2009
Our Possible CD/DVD Storage Solution
Brandon and I are still weighing our options for CD and DVD storage, but we think we’ve settled on the perfect solution for us. Thank you for all of your suggestions and advice!

As I had mentioned, we’re not ready to go 100% digital. We’re probably about 40% there… Brandon has 34 GB of music on his computer, and I have another 22GB on mine. We do have most of the music we currently listen to on our computers, but we still play CDs all the time. And Brandon is a movie person. I think I have 10 or 15 DVDs, but Brandon has about 700. PLUS video games. Here’s where they’re all stored:

Those are Billy bookcases with doors in Brandon’s office, but we’ve filled them to capacity. Overfilled them, actually. And we don’t have any more room in our house for additional storage… unless we can use the dead space under the stairs leading to the second floor. The room looked like this when we moved in:

We just lined up the bookcases to block that big open space. If we got a couple of media cabinets from Can-Am though, I think we could install them so they seem built-in.

Brandon and I are both crazy about the way Rearranged Design stored their CDs. If we get the same CD sleeves and these DVD sleeves, we could fit everything into one tidy space. The only problem? This will not be an inexpensive undertaking. BUT…
- The CD sleeves show the spine of each CD insert, so they’re still browsable.
- The DVD sleeves hold the covers without cutting or folding them, and they hold two discs.
- This setup would solve our storage problem and we’d still have room to grow.
- Alphabetization would be easier to maintain with sleeves than with a binder.
- Taking out a few CDs at a time with their corresponding sleeves seems easier than grabbing a bunch of loose discs from several different binders.
- The cabinets have a safety feature to prevent toppling by only allowing one drawer to be pulled out at a time. Brandon was almost crushed by a filing cabinet once, so he’s all too familiar with the danger. We will soon have a curious toddler, so this feature is a big plus for us.
- The drawers can be locked. Again, with a curious toddler on the way this is another big plus.
- We could FREE UP SOME SPACE in the rest of the house.
Now we’re just trying to decide if we want to tackle this whole project at once, or if we should do it in phases. We could start with the CDs first, storing them in boxes that we already have. And when we move on to the DVDs (and outgrow the boxes), we could find an affordable dresser instead of the cabinets to save money. Or do we just spring for it all now? It’s a little crazy, but it would be so nice after it’s finished.
August 10, 2009
CD Storage?

Yesterday, Brandon said something that made me very happy: “Let’s get rid of all these CD cases.”

Right now, we have most of our CDs in the five BENNO towers that are in my office to the left and right of my EXPEDIT. We also have several hundred more in my office closet though, and in the stacks and stacks that seem to accumulate throughout the house.

We need to condense our music library, but we’re not ready to go 100% digital. These Semikolon boxes look really nice, but I think we’d need too many. Plus, I already have a million IKEA KASSETT boxes in pink (which seems to be a discontinued color), so I could just use those. Maybe if we transfered all of the CDs into paper sleeves that would make boxes more of a practical option? Or these CD/booklet display sleeves so we can store the liner notes too? Or maybe the CD binder route would be better — I think that’s what Brandon wants.

How do you store your music? Or have you guys gone completely digital? And while we’re at it, what about DVDs and video games? ‘Cause we’ve run out of space for those too.

July 31, 2009
Washed, Folded, Sorted, Labeled, Stored

Brandon thought it was very funny that I had to go to the trouble of labeling these bins of baby clothes. “Can’t you just open them up and see what sizes are inside,” he asked.

Yes, but this makes me so much happier. ;)

March 31, 2009