letters & love: organized!

I'm happy to say that in only about 2 hours, I went from this:

... to this: (the colorful boxes)

Much better, right? Here's what I did:

I wanted to use the Container Store boxes, rather than a big, ugly file box to organize all our cards, letters and memorabilia. I went to Walgreens and bought an aqua-colored sharpie and a few sheets of poster board, and made my own little index cards. I made up my own categories to sort them by, and divided them up!

It took three boxes to store them all. The boxes are for:

1. letters and cards: thank-you notes, Christmas (and other holiday) cards, "thinking of you" cards, etc.
2. wedding: notecards and greeting cards given to us, misc. items like our wedding video and a CD of all our professional pictures.
3. our memories: memorabilia between me and my husband, such as ticket stubs from movies we saw together (we've saved all of them!), notes we've written each other, flight ticket stubs from trips, etc.

The last thing I wanted to organize was my decor file. I had one started in a binder, but it was tedious to put them in the pages, and it was getting really stuffed. I cleaned it wayyyyy out (it's funny how my tastes have changed and a lot of the images I'd clipped no longer appeal to me), and sorted them into categories. I felt it was only fitting to use something decor-related for my container, and this vintage traveling case was just thing.

I couldn't believe how little room the papers took up once I was done. They used to stuff an entire binder, and now they take up less than half the traveling case. But, I'm sure I'll build it back up to stuffed in no time;) I love magazines!



PS I'll draw a winner at 4:00pm Pacific time, so if you haven't entered in this drawing, it's not too late!
UPDATE: The drawing has closed. Thanks for playing!