Organising paper pad storage

Warning - this is picture heavy!!

Sigh, searching through my paper pads when crafting was driving me totally crackers here. I had them piled in shallow drawers like one half side of this trolley (really wasteful on space at the side of the drawer):

 and the Christmas ones were in a deep  A4 sized box (again wasteful on space):

In a 'neat freak' mood I did a little bit of research and found a solution which I think, time will tell though, will work for me. First step was to order some CD storage boxes like these:

 

They came in packs of four, the lids - which I didn't intend to use - are ready assembled and the bases can be assembled in no time. Yup, I chose pink - now there's a surprise :) I know that Ikea also sell them, or something very similar, but no way was I trolling off to Ikea in a canoe at the minute. They're just a smidgen over 6" wide - perfect!

So, now I had the boxes, the next step was to empty a book shelf in the craft room and begin to play. The books are all destined for the local Hospice shop and, as part of my purge, more will follow - but this was at least one cleared shelf to play with.

I then went through drawers and boxes, pulling out every 6" and 8" square paper pad/pack. The first issue was that I wanted the pads to be stored upright instead of flat as they had been before, so I can flip through them easily. I didn't want them to be stored in poly bags (partly due to the limiting width of the boxes not having much to spare), but I do have a habit of just popping leftover snippets inside the front covers and of course they would just drop out - sigh. But, more online searching came up with a solution which I adapted to suit. This is it:

Little pockets to hold the snippets inside the back cover of each paper pad. I used 5.5" wide envelopes, sealed them and then chopped them in half to get two pockets per envelope. I did consider cellophane bags chopped down so I could see through them but they were going to be too flimsy.

So here's a paper pad with some snippets - I confess that with this system I had to chop a little bit off any pieces that would be too wide, or even right on the paper pad height, so they would fit. But, after the whole exercise I'd lost very little paper in fact.

And here are the pieces tucked into the little pocket - which I just stuck onto the inside of the back cover using a tape runner.

Here's one of the boxes, all loaded with Christmas papers - and room for even more to come if I decide to spend, spend, spend :) Oh, and A5 paper pads sit really nicely at the back of the boxes too - yay, I hadn't bargained on that.

I did the same with my 8" paper pads, this time using 7.25" square envelopes sealed and then chopped in half to make the pockets and they sit happily upright and sideways on in one of the boxes.

And here are the four boxes, all loaded and sitting cosily on the shelf. Still need to do the labels for the fronts of the boxes and also just a few dividers as I did categorise the pads a little bit into types but not much, things like vintage, male, contemporary, gingham, flowers and so on.

Some little tricks I used are - some pads had the front, and sometimes the back, covers loose. I just flipped a couple of pieces of sellotape over the pad spine to keep the covers in place. Some paper packs came totally without a glued spine, so I did the same thing as whole loose sheets within the same pad/pack should be fine. I don't plan on digging about in there like a dog looking for a bone folks!

I also sealed and cut a few spare envelope 'pockets' for future use 'cos those snippets sure do breed and I only added pockets to those where there were snippets to be stored. Some papers may never have snippets, such as full sheet ones in the vintage ranges.

It's just food for thought, you might probably all have your own super efficient filing systems. Including sorting out the books for the charity shop this little exercise took me less than half a day.

Just ordered some more boxes and I think the embossing folders will be next for 'the treatment', then those chunky Tim Holtz dies and perhaps the DVD sized boxes containing unmounted SU stamps - watch this space.

And why are you peeking to see what books are left on those other shelves in the photo huh? :) Little 'sticky beak'!

Di
x