I am so excited to kick off our new Idea Room Organizational Tips series with Clean Mama! I always feel the need to clean, organize and de-junk my home during the month of January and Clean Mama is just the person to with the skills and know how to get me headed in the right direction. If you don’t follow her blog get on over there…you don’t know what you are missing. And lucky for you…she is going to be posting here every other Thursday for several weeks helping us get our homes and clutter in tip top shape. But enough from me…here’s Becky aka Clean mama!
Hello Idea Room Readers – I’m Becky from the Clean Mama blog and I’m so excited to be here today! For the first installment of “Organizing Tips”, I’m going to show you how I made my own address and telephone number box – to replace my beloved Rolodex.
I love to have numbers and addresses handy in the kitchen by the phone – but I wanted to come up with a cuter way to keep those contacts handy.
I love to have numbers and addresses handy in the kitchen by the phone – but I wanted to come up with a cuter way to keep those contacts handy.
say goodbye to this little guy
start with a box – this could be a vintage recipe box tin, an old recipe card box that you no longer use, or (this is what I did) you can purchase an unfinished hinged box here at JoAnn.com (get an online code from retailmenot.com to get an even better discount)
choose your paints – I mixed these three colors to get just the right color to accent my kitchen
paint entire box (inside, outside, bottom)
in a word document, type up dividers for your sections – or I made a printable of the ones that I used – there’s a black and a teal version
print out labels to divide up your contacts alphabetically (I printed mine on a patterned piece of scrapbook paper, cut to 8 1/2 x 11 inches)
cut into desired shapes
decoupage label to box and paint the gel medium on the entire box
(I use Martha’s, but Mod Podge is awesome too)
glue labels to index cards – carefully space the labels so you can see all the labels at the same time, like file
folders
put your addresses and phone numbers in your new box
some ideas for how to organize your information:
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hand write names, addresses, numbers, birthdays the old-fashioned way
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mail merge your digital address book on labels (use a cute font and center it) and affix the labels on index cards
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print out the addresses and numbers on cardstock using this Avery template (you can buy perforated note cards too, but I like to cut the cards so I have a nice clean line)
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I like to put birthdays and anniversaries on the cards too for an extra place to reference those important dates
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glue down business cards to notecards to keep everything the same size and easy to find
Thanks for having me Amy! I hope this is a fun organizing tip for all of you – I’d love for you to come and visit me at my blog, Clean Mama – January is Cleaning Month, so there’s lots of dust flying around.
★Amy 
I love this idea! I have too many phone books for the kids school and many numbers chicken scratched on pieces of paper! Thanks for the idea!
Megan
I might just have to do this. I have everything on my phone and papers around the house but I fear that we are too reliant on our phones and if anything happened to them I wouldn't even know my mom's phone number! {only slightly kidding} This is a good goal for me this year. Thanks for sharing!
What a cute idea. I love Clean Mama!
What's kind of funny (and sad) is that I bought a box just like this to turn it into an address box but I never did get around to it… and I bought that box at least 2 years ago!
Thanks for the great tutorial Becky.
Popping over to visit your blog now.
i love this idea! So organized and pretty too!!!
Thanks for the tips and intro to such a cute blogger!
~Shelley
Great project! I might be able to adapt this to make my first project with my new Silhouette machine! Thanks for the idea!
Very cool. Tutorials always make things look so easy, and attractive! xx
I love this idea. It looks so awesome. I am in an organizing mood these days and this is a perfect project for my little daughter and myself to work on this weekend!!
I'm loving how cute this is!
Cute project! Looking forward to more great organizational tips!
Ok you seem to be in my mind this is just what I was thinking. This is on my to do list this weekend! Thank you so much :)
Rachel