A few weeks ago I told you I was tackling organization and sprucing of our home office, and phase one is complete!

The built-ins came with the house and have been great for storage but we haven’t been very thoughtful in how we organized things, and as a result, they had become a mess.

It really didn’t make me happy to be in here because I’d look up and see this disaster staring me down.  Not to mention it was hard to find anything I was looking for because things were stacked up half falling over.  There was no rhyme or reason to any of it.

Step one here was clearing everything out.  I started with the cabinets and took out every item, organized by type (paper products, candles, upholstery supplies, fabric, etc.) then grouped like items together and neatly packed things back into the cabinets.  I used a lot of plastic bins to corral smaller items.

For the open shelves I wanted a combination of functional and pretty.  With all of my furniture, sewing, and upholstery work I have a lot of fabric scraps and this is how they were “organized” before.

I wanted to be able to see everything but still have it neatly packed away and decided on these wire baskets from Crate and Barrel to do the job.

I also shopped around for some pretty accents that could do double duty as storage, like the driftwood bowl above, which adds a nice natural element to the shelves but also holds my camera and extra lenses.

Some items are just plain decorative – after years of staring at bookshelves piled up with old textbooks and my project extras, I wanted some pretty!  A few of my favorites are the glass cloche, yarn-wrapped gazelle, and silver salt cellar (can you see the tiny spoon?).

So I’m on my way on here!  Next I’ll be ripping off the moulding and re-trimming the whole built-in, including the doors, with flat moulding, in sort of a Shaker style.  I’m also thinking of papering the backs of the open shelves.  I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to have everything pretty, organized, and easy to find.  This project took a few days and a lot of mess (picture piles on the floor everywhere) but it sure was worth it.