Organizing all of those paint bottles....

Last night I was looking around on the net for some kind of efficient display / storage for all of my paint bottles, and I only saw one spinning rack that even looked useful - but it had a large footprint, I'd have to order it, and it was $25 + shipping, handling, tax, and all that. Then I came across a note from someone about how they had just turned their bottles on their sides on a shelf and stacked them, and they held very well.

It suddenly occurred to me that I have about 10 mini milk crates that I could turn on their sides at the back of my work table and stack the bottles in them. Bonus: the crates join together so that they don't slide around. And they're all a nice speckled light grey, so visually they don't even demand a lot of notice. (Yay Dollar Tree!!)

The paint bottles fit in there PERFECTLY, too. :) I had enough room to put in all of my paint bottles, with one cubby for the enamels, one for metallics and mediums, two for off-brand paints, and the rest for my One Stroke paints.

I also moved the worktable from the middle of the room to in front of the window, which necessitated moving the catch-all bins from the corner into the middle temporarily. All of the plastic drawers I put in the corner beside the table, in a double stack. The rack for my scrapbook papers is on top of the drawers with my scrapbooking bag now, though I might move that heavy thing under the table so that I can avoid worrying that it's going to fall over and off the drawer bank.

I'll post some pictures when the room looks less like a disaster area - right now there's a little more room to move and work in there, but it's still pretty perilous.

Unfortunately, I only managed to fill up the garbage can once, but truth be told, I did spend a lot of time last night organizing stuff that I knew I wouldn't be throwing away. And the garbage can is totally packed. I am getting my house-painting tools back together.

I realized as I really got going in the job that I needed a place to put all of my drawing stuff, and that I didn't need to use the entire left side of the desk drawers for painting supplies and tools. Since I moved all of the paints onto the desktop, I put all of the Creative Gear painting bags together into one carrier and put it on top of the cabinet. I'd toyed with the idea of hanging the bags on the wall with the bottles in them, but it would have meant finding display space for 8 bags, and I still wouldn't have had any place to put the off-brand bottles or the large bottles. I can always pull out the Creative Gear bags again if I need to take my paints and brushes somewhere.

The room already looks less visually tiring and I'm starting to feel the urge to get in there and do some creative work. :)

Two file boxes are now empty, though I can't actually find their tops. I'm thinking that maybe I could put my most often-referenced magazines and books into them and then when I need to find something, all I'll have to do is pull out the correct book - especially if I sort them by category.

Considering that people are now stealing my stuff, I'm hesitant to drag everyting out to the carport. With all the theiving kids out on spring break like me, they're probably being allowed to run around the streets unsupervised at all hours of the night. If they know me and where I live, they'd probably tear through my stuff just for meanness - even if they couldn't find anything they wanted to take.

I know that if I pulled everything outside and then started putting it back inside, organizing as I go, things would work better. But now I don't even trust anybody in the daylight with my stuff outside.

I still need to take the shelving system I bought over to the school for our teacher work area. And I also need to sort through all my yarn so that I can let other teachers have what they want. I was thinking last night that it wouldn't be unreasonable to keep 1 skein of each color for myself, and donate all the rest. Except for the really expensive yarn of course. I know that I have enough skeins of one Homespun dye lot to make a sweater, so I'll keep that. It's virgin yarn and it cost me about $60 anyway. I'm sure it wouldn't take up much space to store that. Anyway, that should get me past the "what if I need it?" pack rat urge. I'll still have enough different colors for any little uses I might have, and if I ever need a bunch of yarn for a big project, I'd probably go and buy it anyway. I might as well throw away all the barely started experiments since I can't remember what size hooks or needles I was using, and I won't remember what patterns I was trying out anyway.

I suppose I should get in the shower and get my day started anyway, since you know who said he might stop by on his way to his training in Nashville. I kinda doubt he will though. He's not that good about follow-through.