Creating a Command Center: The Final Reveal

Bit by bit, I've shared my process of creating a command center in our home. Today is the day for the big reveal of the entire project all put together. Well, mostly all put together. 

Let’s start at the beginning. 

If I had to describe this space in two words, I’d use majorly under-utilized. Is that three words? Either way, this command center project had three purposes.

First, it is an effort to thwart my own laziness. This space has become an easy dumping ground for items that either have no real home or items I’m just too lazy to return to their real homes. So task one, end homelessness.

Second, this project is an effort to purge unnecessary items. We have two of every office supply you can imagine: two computers, two staplers, two desk organizers, two desks, two rulers, etc. We’re kind of like the double mint twins, only less refreshing. 

And last, I wanted to relieve the brown oppression going on in our abode. I love our house, but there is so much brown! I’m craving color and this was a great spot to bring some in.

Project 1 was moving our active files from a tippy, cramped plastic filing cabinet into one of the built-in drawers in the command center. Now, they are easily accessible and conveniently located. 

Next, I consolidated our wealth of office supplies into a manageable collection and repurposed “junk” drawers into organized office supply drawers. I also added two large baskets to hold legal pads, note book paper, and other larger accessories that wouldn’t fit in the drawers.

I made a dry-erase calendar so we could keep track of ourselves.

I updated another dumping ground device, our mail organizer, into a functional system to keep us from becoming buried in paper. After that post, I ended up changing the labels to a different color because, while the red looked great on the black organizer, it didn’t really match the overall color scheme of the command center. They are now blue!

In an effort to conceal our apparent wine addiction and, more importantly, to curtail the number of random slips of paper floating around, I put together a DIY cork board for free!

I purged and hung our writing utensils so they are readily available whenever we need them. I also wanted to keep the Mister aware of how many pens we had so he’d stop bringing them home from work and other various places. So far, it’s been successful!

Finally, I added some much needed color. My intention was to use liquid starch to transform the fabric into temporary wall paper but because the fabric was so think and my patience was so thin, I ended up pinning the fabric into the wood using a few small straight pins and then hot gluing ribbon onto the edges of the fabric to conceal the pins and cut edges. This way, if I get sick of the fabric or want to change it up, I just have to remove a few pins to take it down.

I still want a new-to-us chair that is a bit more comfy and brings in more color. I want to purge our two desktop computers and two desks located in the spare bedroom and purchase one laptop to use in the command center space. I also want to address the cabinets above the desk and the shelves next to the desk. But all of those wants must wait.

For now, this space is commanding me to throw off my laziness and get to work on other things!

Creating a Command Center: DIY Cork Board

I love solutions that alleviate more than one problem. I also love solutions that involve drinking wine. This project does both!

As I was putting our command center together, I decided I needed something to hang next to the paint chip calendar because the wall looked a bit bare. 

I didn't just want to add something random that took up space. I wanted something functional. We have a small-ish white board that has been roaming around our house looking for a place to call home for awhile now and I thought it'd be perfect for this spot. But when I got around to hanging it up I realized it was a bit too big. 

Knowing I needed to find another solution, I poured myself a glass of wine and did some brain storming about what would really be functional in this space. I decided that some sort of bulletin board would be best - either a magnetic board that we could post up photos or notes or business cards with magnets or a corkboard that we could do the same thing with except with push pins. I debated back and forth until I remembered a bag of corks that I had found when I cleaned out the DRAWERS in this space. A DIY corkboard? A solution for my wall, a solution for all those scrap pieces of paper floating around, and a solution for the insane amount of corks the mister and I have collected over the years. Genius!

I really didn't want to spend too much money on this project. Well, who am I kidding, I never really want to spend too much money on ANY project... so I started rummaging around the house for supplies. I found a couple picture frames I picked up about a year ago at a garage sale for FREE! And, I found some acrylic paint that mostly matched the color scheme of the command center. I was set.

My first step was to paint the frame. I removed the backing and the glass and covered it in three coats of paint.

Once it was dry, I sat down to watch an episode of American Idol (I'm not sure I can really get into it this year, but nothing else was on) and I spilled out all our corks on the coffee table. I slid the original backing back into the frame, but left the glass out. Then I just started arranging a basic pattern with the corks until I had a row that I liked. I used my mini glue gun to glue the row into place before moving on to the next row. 

This project went pretty fast. The arranging and gluing of the corks only took about 45 minutes. The bottom row was a bit tricky but I ended up having a cork in our bin that had broke in half when we opened the bottle and it remedied the problem easily. 

So cute! I learned a few things from this project. First, cute projects can be done for free. Second, wine helps me brainstorm. And third, we really need to venture out in the varieties of wine we are enjoying because I had a hard time getting different types of corks into the frame. I must have went through a Barefoot and Yellow Tail phase...

Anyway, the board fits perfectly in it's new home and I've already starting pinning goodies onto it. 

I intend to hang both the calendar and the corkboard on the wall - but I have a wall treatment in mind to bring more color into this space first! Stay tuned! 

This project was featured in a link-up at:

Creating a Command Center: Writing Utensil Organization

I'm fearful my mister is a pen hoarder. I like to have a pen lying around here and there for that spontaneous idea or phone number I need to take down. But his hoarding has led to this...

I told him I was pretty sure the pen police would be coming for him soon. I told him there are pen deprived people all over this city because of him. I don't think he took me seriously...

Anyway, to continue to get our command center in order, I decided the insane amount of writing utensils stored in our house must be addressed. 

So, I gathered every writing utensil in the house that I could find. I emptied out all of our "pen holders" and also found the following: a screwdriver, a button, a couple bandaids I wouldn't dare put near an open wound, a key, a raffle ticket, two parachute men, a 2006 key chain, some coin rolls, a pig key ring, a stick of gum, three tubes of chapstick, a bobby pin, a safety pin, and some temporary cement bonding glue. Can you find all of these items below?

Next, I did what any normal person would do - I tested out every writing utensil. Yep, every.single.one. That's normal right?

I threw away anything that didn't work or was real close to not working as well as anything too gross for me to touch to test it out. Then I sorted the remaining items into three groups: work, keep, donate. Work was a distinct group of pens that the mister brings home from work. I am sure no one else in his office is able to write due to a lack of pens and a tight budget. The keep pile consisted of nice pens that I'd enjoy using, a few pencils with good erasers, and some highlighters and Sharpie markers. The rest went into the donate pile. I don't know if people buy pens from thrift stores, but I figured someone could make use of them. 

My next step was to figure out how to store everything in the keep pile. I really like these hanging bucket ideas:

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I tried to find some already-made kits but they were a little more pricey than what I was hoping to pay. I picked up a tension rod and some ribbon for about $7 at Jo-Ann Fabrics and grabbed three pencil cups at the dollar store. I used my Cricut and my home printer to create some tag labels and attached those to the pencil cups with the ribbon. 

Then I put up the tension rod across the office desk space and used a level to make sure my buckets wouldn't all slide to one end. I attached each of the three buckets to the rod using the same ribbon. The ribbon has some nylon in it, so I used a candle lighter to melt the knots of the ribbon to keep them from pulling out from the weight of the pens. I also melted the exposed ends of the ribbon to keep them from fraying. 

Finally, I put a portion of the "keep" utensils into each of the buckets. I don't think the tension rod is capable of holding everything I decided to keep. At the same time, I don't think it's necessary to even have THAT many writing utensils in the house. Nonetheless, I will store the remainders in some baskets that I'll show you later. 

I like how the project turned out and I like even more that it was only $10. 

I threatened the mister that the buckets will only hold so much weight - so he should probably be more choosy in which writing utensils he brings home. Is there a Pens Anonymous group? 

The command center is coming along nicely. I still have two or three projects left before it's "done"!

How do you store your writing utensils? Do you have a pen hoarder in your house?

Get Your Drawers In Order!

I will start by clarifying that this is not a laundry post or a post about unmentionables. I'm talking strictly about actual drawers and, in this case, drawers that store office supplies. As I work through creating our command center and updating our little home office nook, I wanted to move the bins of office supplies that are currently stashed in our second bedroom into this space. There are three drawers built in to the desk and, up until now, they were used to store.... well whatever we needed to get off the desk, honestly. So I decided it was time to get these drawers in order!

The first order of business was to go through all of the office supplies and decide what we needed, what could be donated, what should be thrown away, and what could better be stored elsewhere. To do this, I made four piles and went through each item one by one. When my four piles were complete, I created a donation bag and put it in my car right away. Then I tossed the things that were trash, and delivered the items that needed to go elsewhere to their final destination. This left me with all the items I hoped to store in the three drawers. I didn't have a lot of containers laying around the house unused so I made a trip to my favorite thrift store to see what I could find. I found some cute colored square bowls, a white ceramic dish divided into three compartments, some old film negative storage containers, and a larger Sterilite container that I hoped to use to store all of our batteries.

I laid out my storage containers on the counter and began placing all those selected items into a container. I had to do and undo a couple times to get each item in an appropriate container, but after a little bit of work, everything had a place.

I picked up some cheap drawer liner at the dollar store and lined all three drawers before placing supplies inside. This way, things will be less likely to slide around and get messy.

Once the liner was in place, I started to arrange the containers. 

The top drawer holds all the items that we use on a regular basis: scissors, white out, binder clips, paper clips, push pins, and staplers. The middle drawer contains small pads of scratch paper, a small screw driver set, and a box of random tools like a putty knife and tape measure. Finally, the bottom drawer holds the container of batteries, matches, candle lighters, and some travel supplies like suitcase locks and a scale. 

The drawers look so much nicer now and it's so easy to find what we're looking for. Stay tuned for more work on the command center coming in the next few weeks!

Creating a Command Center: Dry Erase Family Calendar

After sprucing up our hanging mail organizer, I was motivated to continue working on our command center. About six years ago, I bought a dry erase calendar board to keep track of my appointments, special holidays, etc. When the Mister and I moved in together, that same dry erase calendar became our family calendar. When he makes plans, he puts them on the calendar so I know when he'll be busy or when to schedule other plans and vice versa. It works very well, but the board is starting to warp and it's color scheme of pink and green just doesn't match our home. Instead of going out and buying a new one, I scoured Pinterest looking for some ideas to make my own. Here is some of the inspiration I found:

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I love the idea of using paint chips to make a calendar because it's completely customizable and relatively cheap! I decided to use this concept to make our new family calendar.

I wanted the calendar to be a decent size but not so large that it took up our whole desk space. I also wasn't looking to spend a ton of money, so I stopped by Salvation Army to see if I could find a cheap frame. I found this beauty for $4.99!

You should have seen the Mister's face when I walked in the door all excited with this. He was petrified I"d be hanging it up in the house.

I sanded the frame down and painted it a dark brown color to blend in with the rest of the house. I've used this paint on several other projects in the house so it matched nicely. 

I grabbed a piece of black poster board at the dollar store for $.69 and cut it to size. Then I stopped at Lowe's and picked up some paint chips. I gathered together colors that were already being used in the house or colors that we hope to bring in in the future so that the calendar would blend in. It will be centrally located in the house in the home office area so I wanted it to easily match. 

I cut the paint chips down to 2x2 inch squares and arranged them in a random pattern. 

Once I was happy with the pattern, I adhered the squares to the poster board with scrapbook adhesive. I used some of the scrap pieces to make day of the week spots and overlapped a few to create a place to write the month. 

I love how this project turned out. It blends in well in it's new home and works perfectly. I decided to leave it setting on the counter top for now because I'm contemplating adding some sort of color or pattern to the wood panel wall in this space but that project must wait for now. 

For just $5.68, we have a beautiful and custom dry erase calendar that will help keep our family organized and on schedule!

How do you keep track of your family's schedule? Have you used paint chips to create a custom piece in your home?

Creating a Command Center: Mail Organization

I believe there should be some law or rule about not having to work on your birthday... I also believe there should be some law or rule that says it cannot snow on your birthday. Yes, today is my birthday and yes I did have to work and yes there is a lot of blowing and drifting snow outside. Alas, I am another year older and another year wiser. Thank you to everyone that has expressed warm birthday wishes and thank you especially for taking some time to read my blog. I truly appreciate it from the bottom of my heart. Now... on to the organizing!

About six months ago, I purchased a hanging organizer from Thirty-One. I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do with it, but I figured it'd help me stay organized. Unfortunately, without a specific plan in place, it has done just the opposite. I hung the organizer in our home office space off the dining room. At the time, there were random papers on the kitchen counter so I grabbed those and neatly tucked them into the hanging slots. While I successfully got the papers off the counter, there really

was no rhyme or reason to the hanging organizer. In fact, I recently went through the papers in the organizer and found that most of them were expired or no longer relevant - so ultimately my "organizer" was only encouraging me to hang on to clutter. This is a classic example of how organizing tools, when not used in a functional way, can actually encourage disorganization. So - time to get this organizer in order!

I have hmmed and hawed about whether or not to keep the organizer hung up and if so, whether to leave it where it is at. After contemplating this for a couple weeks, I decided that the organizer itself could be very useful and I feel it's hanging in the best possible spot for now. I took a random inventory of the piles on the kitchen counter to get an idea of what categories I might need storage for. I did this over the course of a couple weeks, since our paper flow fluctuates throughout the week and month. I finally decided on five categories, one for each slot of the organizer: 1.) Outgoing, 2.) To File, 3.) To Read, 4.) To Pay, and 5.) Coupons.

I knew that if I didn't label these slots, I'd forget which is what and things would end up stuck in random slots and again, not be helpful. So I used Microsoft Excel to design some simple labels.

I printed out each label on regular white printer paper and used some packaging tape to make them a bit more sturdy. I've really got to invest in a laminating machine! That'd be a great birthday present idea... ;)

As you probably noticed, the final labels look a bit different than the labels shown in Excel. When I printed a test label, I realized the labels would be too big for the slot, especially when paper would be stuffed into each one. I modified the size just a tad and they work perfectly now. 

I didn't want the label to be permanent in anyway because I want to use this system for awhile and be able to make adjustments if necessary. For that reason, I just used small binder clips we had in our office supplies to attach each label to it's own mail slot.

Next, I went through all the papers that had been in the organizer and all the papers that had accumulated on the counter and sorted them accordingly. Everything seemed to fit into a category relatively easily.

The organizer is a little more bright and cheery and, with its new labels, it appears to be a bit more functional as well. I'm excited to put this great tool to good use!

Do you have an organizing tool that is hurting more than helping? How about a general birthday rule you think should be in effect?