Divide and Conquer Drawers

When it comes to organising your drawers it seems divide and conquer is the way to go.

Drawer organising DIT tutorial

It's time for another pinterest challenge, where a bunch of creative bloggers all share something they've made that was inspired by a pin or two.

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This month I chose one of the most pinned pins I've ever seen. SO many times I spotted this on someone organising ideas board. I think it's pinned so much as it is just a really good idea.

Simple, cheap drawer organisation - fab!

So let's get started! The pin that inspired me is here and the tutorial over at IHeart Organising is here.

This is not my first attempt at this idea. I'd done it at our old house where we had a large shallow top drawer to a built in wardrobe/dressing table. I brought the boxes with us and put them in one of the small but deep top drawers of our lovely new Ikea Hemnes chest of drawers, the one with the fancy new glass knobs.

before drawer organisation

As you can see, it didn't really work. The new drawer is twice the depth and everything just got piled up, I was finding it quite hard to find anything in this mess!

I didn't deviate from the tutorial at IHeart Organizing very much except for a few tweaks.

  • I used wallpaper samples to cover my boxes

  • I cut some of the boxes to fit my drawer in a way that I found to be super easy.

First collect a load of boxes, cereal packets are ideal - you've already bought them full of cereal so no additional purchasing is necessary. 

Arrange them in your drawer, it's much easier to do if you take the drawer out if possible. Then using a pencil, draw along the sides at top of the drawer height.

If you then flatten the box you can cut straight across with scissors.

boxes ready for drawer organisation

Then just remake the box and tape up the base.

I was able to get two dividers from each cereal box, one from each end.

To make smaller boxes I just chopped the flattened box in half, and then slid one half into the other as far as necessary then taped it all up.

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Once you are happy with your box arrangement you could just stop there. Perfectly serviceable, nothing wrong with that and at the end of the day how often to people go poking about in your drawers? Not often I hope!

However if you want your drawers to make you happy each time you open them, then carry on and make them pretty.

Cover the boxes with paper following the easy to follow instructions on IHeart Organizing. That original tutorial used scrapbook paper - you could do that, there are load of beautiful papers about and anyone who does a lot of crafts might have some lying around.

I used wall paper samples that I had left over from another project. (all part of my "changing what we have to make it go nicely in the new house" plan) 

Some wallpapers are not easy to stick with tape but good enough for this purpose and they were free which is even better! You can always add a dob of pva or other paper glue to the back of the wall paper to fix it to the cereal boxes if needed.

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drawer organising

Once I was done I filled up my drawer dividers as neatly as I could. Much better!

after drawer organisation

Apart from a couple of old receipts that I threw away, everything that was in there before went back in and there is a load of space at the back - amazing eh! 

Easy to replace if they get damaged at all and the whole process took me about 2 hours start to finish. I took it all downstairs and did this whilst I watched tv.

Here are the other great pinspired projects for this month. 

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I’ll be sharing this project at these link ups