Small Office Organization - Part 1

Finally I have my first project ready to share with all of you, I was inspired by Jen over at her IHeart Organizing Blog, this month the theme is Home Office  Organizing.  This was a much needed project in my own little office, which is part of the guest room so it has to stay neat and confined. Lately, I find my office expanding onto the bed behind my desk and surrounding surfaces due to a lack of good organization for my small space, not a good thing if company suddenly arrives, time to get to work. When I saw Jen’s desk drawer makeover it motivated me to do something for my less then stellar little drawer. Take a look at what I did to clean it up and make it easier to find all my little goodies.

Here it is my dirty little secret, my junk desk drawer the only one in a very small desk.  I had this desk as a kid; it belonged to my Dad who used it to study at while in law school.  My daughter had it to study on all through school then it was left behind to sit in my attic for years and years. When we moved into our newest home I rescued it from storage and gave it a complete face lift then placed the desk in my guestroom/office.  (You can see the complete makeover on my blog Buttons, Bows & Bling in the archives.) As you can see the drawer was a jumbled mess which got that way every time I opened and closed the drawer, things would always slide around no matter how many times I straightened it up.

The first thing I did was to empty the drawer, give it good wipe down then add some pretty scrapbook paper to the bottom to line it. Once the drawer was ready I created piles out of all the contents: keep, trash and file elsewhere.

Since it is a small space I did not want to spend much money to organize it so I pulled items from my office supplies and some other things hanging around the office shelves and put them to good use. I had some purple pencil boxes I kept paint brushes in and opened one up to help divide the drawer into different size spaces.  The only thing I purchased was a shorter pencil size box from the Martha Stewart Home Office collection at Staples; it was on clearance, lucky me. Those two items helped to give the drawer division and keep everything from moving around every time it was opened.

Last but not least and very important were the clear binder pockets I chose to corral all my address labels, stamps, stickers and notepads.  I love those binder pockets I use them for things like sewing pattern prototypes, kit pieces and a whole host of other projects I need to see while they are in progress. They seemed like the perfect solution to all the clutter and I was right, it worked.

There you have it my small desk drawer re-organization, thanks for letting me share it with you today; I hope it inspires you to clean up your office desk drawer soon. Next up are more of my small office clean ups and cleaver ways to create attractive storage.

See you soon.

Laurette