My Study - Tub Labels

Step One in my study makeover (which you can read more about here) was to reorganise the built-in cupboard.  I am lucky to have a really deep cupboard built into this room...  When we first moved in, I had my father-in-law build me these two great bookshelves, which turned the cupboard into a walk-in for my schoolwork and folders.

Unfortunately, as you can see by the pictures, my resources soon outgrew these shelves, which resulted in everything overflowing onto the floor!  I have seriously tidied up this cupboard dozens of times over the years... but I just never found a system that I could maintain.

Look at this mess!  It hurts my head!

So, it was a complete re-arrange on the cards... I decided it was out with the shelves, and the folders needed to be moved to another larger bookcase.  In place of the shelves in here, I was delighted to measure up and find out that I could fit 18 large storage tubs in here!  That is a lot of tubs ;)

First I grabbed all of the boxes and tubs that I had in the study and also in various other cupboards throughout the house, which contained my school supplies, our business and personal records.  I wanted everything related to the study now living in there!  Centralising everything is imperitive to making an organisation system work.

This is what that looked like:

By doing this, it showed me that there would be plenty of space in the cupboard to pull this off, so I knew I could go ahead now and get started. 

I spent a few hours sorting through these tubs, boxes and bags, reallocating the contents into the new storage tubs (I kept 4 of the existing tubs, and topped up the supply so that they were all a uniform size, shape and colour).  I didn't do a big de-clutter, I plan to do this when I have extra time down the track.  For now, my project was to get everything sorted and into tubs.  I just needed to get a system up and running, and then I can refine it later on. 

I know that the perfectionist in me could have spent hours going through every last paper or game piece before putting it into a tub, and it probably would have resulted with more organised tubs in the long run.  BUT I know that I would have lost interest part-way through such a massive job and then I wouldn't have any system in place at all - just a big mess!  I know from experience that it is better to do something imperfectly, rather than to do nothing at all :)

So I packed each of the boxes and wrote a list of the contents onto a piece of notepaper and stuck it to the front of the boxes.  This is what it looked like...

Next I whipped up some lovely labels, which I ran through my laminator.  And here is the finished product!

Having detailed labels is another key to having an organised system that is easy to use and maintain as a neat and orderly system.  Previously I had labelled my school tubs with Maths or English.  But when I had 3 tubs labelled Maths, I found that often I would have to open 2 or 3 tubs to find any maths resources that I was looking for.  This time, the labels are much more prescriptive!

The final element that is yet to be added to this cupboard, is an additional shelf, right between the second and third tubs.  It will make accessing the bottom tubs much easier, rather than having to unstack them all of the time.  That is a job for the hubs... Fingers crossed he gets motivated to help me out sometime soon ;)

Oh, and I can't wait to show you what I do with the rolls of wrapping paper!!


Read more about our Study Makeover here.