paper

As much as I love paper, storing it can be a real a challenge.  You may remember that I bought this armoire to store craft supplies, including paper:

I love it, and it holds a lot of craft supplies, but it wasn't working that great for paper.  I had all of my paper in vertical paper holders and they just barely fit on the shelf in the armoire.  Because it was quite dark inside the armoire I always needed to take each paper holder out in order to see what I was looking for, which was a real pain.

Another problem in my craft area was in a corner of the room where I had stacked several plastic drawer units.  It looked messy and it was hard to get the drawers open because of the weight of multiple units stacked on top of one another.  Here's what it looked like:

In order to solve both of these problems I decided to buy 12" x 12" stackable paper trays, which would store my paper but keep it more visible.  I ordered 20 stackable trays but I knew that I would need something to set them on so that I could see the paper in the bottom tray without laying on the floor.

Luckily I found a table that was small enough to fit in the space but large enough to hold the trays.  I actually found two tables - and I have no idea what I'll do with the taller table but it was so cute I just had to have it.  Here's a look at both tables:

Cute, right?  I'm not crazy about the color of the taller table but once I decide where I'm going to use it I can give it a quick coat of paint and it will be awesome.  The shorter table is the one that I bought for my stackable paper trays.

I sorted my paper by color or theme and when the trays arrived I was excited to get that corner of my room looking better.  Here's a look at that corner now:

As you can see, the table fits perfectly and the trays are almost all full.  To be honest I have a lot of paper that's not in these trays - tablets of paper that I haven't taken apart.  I still might do that, but I kind of like having those tablets all in one piece because it's nice to have a whole tablet of coordinated paper for larger projects.  We'll see, I may end up taking them apart yet.  I was able to fit one of the plastic drawer units under the table and the other two fit nicely under my desk.

Freeing up a whole shelf in the armoire allowed me to fit some miscellaneous supplies inside rather than piled on the floor.  Now that I'm more organized I hope to actually get some crafting done!