I am an organizational freak. I know a lot of brides like to say that. But I always question how much they mean it. Have I ever showed you the storage system in our house? No?
Well, this is our laundry room. Yes, our laundry room.
My fiancé and I organize things into these little bins so that we can always find things when we need them. We have similar setups in other closets in our house too.
So, the thought of having little items in different parts of our house for the next six months is driving me crazy. Over the last several weeks, we’ve purchased vases, digital cameras, votive candle holders, burlap, cakestands, and lots of other things. And after I’ve unpacked each box, the items have remained on our kitchen table. No good. These things need to get packed away for the next several months. But, before I do that, I want to photograph everything and measure everything, so I know exactly what I have, and I don’t need to physically see it.
So, I enlisted the help of my trusty DIY lightbox (modified slightly from the tutorial found here) to photograph the items. Several months back, I created one of these out of PVC pipe from Home Depot, but I had never actually used it for anything. Well, now I finally have a use!
I photographed all the items that I’ve purchased to-date and recorded their dimensions (only some are pictured below). These are what the items look like photographed in the lightbox
Then, I went upstairs to my computer, and printed out what I call a “large bin” label (like the one on the dark purple bin in the far left of the first photo) on my trusty Brother QL-570
Then, I dug through our “Mailing and Shipping Supplies” bin to get some stuff to help protect the fragile items in the bin. I just layered the packaging material throughout. We save a lot of the packaging material that are in boxes we get, like from Amazon.com. Once that box is full, we stop saving materials, and sadly, just throwing it away. But after a few months, the supply goes down a little, so we save a few more supplies. The boxes on the right are just a nested set of boxes we keep in case we have to ship anything. Like the packaging supplies, we just keep a certain amount of boxes. In this case, we have two nested sets of boxes. But as we use them, we save more.
And, voila! All of my vases and cakestands are packed away neatly and I can forget about them until November!
