Organization's Snazzy New Look

One of the perks of my current job is getting a full week off from Christmas to New Year. This year I did spend part of the holiday in Ohio visiting my dad's family, but I still enjoyed several days at home working on projects that have been at a standstill.

My home office is one of those projects. As I've mentioned before, the room basically became a storage area when I moved in. When I adopted Rowena in July and cleaned out the spare room for a new roommate in August the room became a catchall. I shoved everything that I couldn't leave in Rowena's reach in the home office. As you may have guessed the room became a nightmare.

I'm trying again to make the space more usable. One idea I've had is to get creative with the storage so that the room isn't so cluttered. Toward that goal I recently pulled the ugly gray filing cabinet out of the closet and painted it to use as an end table.

Then I took an idea I'd seen on Pinterest and bought a wire shelf at Lowe's. The idea is to install the shelf parallel to a wall to create a narrow space to store wrapping paper. Since all my wrapping paper was precariously balanced on top of the filing cabinet in the closet this seemed like a good time to try out the new idea.

As far as Pinterest projects go I wouldn't label this a fail, but I ran into a few complications. I measured the space before buying a shelf and decided I needed a shelf that was right around three feet. However, the anchors I bought to secure the shelf to the wall didn't allow for the shelf to be shorter than the space.

The wire edge is supposed to hook into the anchor, but since the anchor is flush to the wall and the shelf is maybe 1 1/2 inches shorter than the space I could only hook one side in. Then I also didn't foresee the issue of the space being even wider above the baseboards.

Ooops.

I made it work by using some wire and jerryrigging the anchor to the shelf with the wire. Not pretty, but it is in the closet. For the upper part of the shelf I put one anchor in the middle of the back wall and used the wire again, mainly so the shelf  doesn't get caught on something and pulled off the other two anchors.

The other problem I ran into is that since I was using anchors I needed to drill a hole into my wall first. Since I don't have drill bits for my drill (and my drill never holds a charge long enough for that type of job) I had to put the project on hold until I could borrow my dad's drill. Once I had that securing the anchors was a 10 minute job at most.

In addition to storing the wrapping paper I also used the space to store some mat board and gift bags that I have. It is definitely a handy use for a space that wasn't used much before!

I don't generally set resolutions, but I do like to have some general goals for the year. I think one of my goals for 2015 will be getting more organized and reducing the clutter (something my guest blogger, Amanda Masters, recently wrote about).

Happy New Year everyone!