Organizing Round-Up: Pictures

This month's project for the Organizing Round-Up was definitely something I had been putting off for a while: Pictures and Memorabilia. I had a ton of pictures without a permanant home, and I also had a ton of scrapbook supplies and just....junk to go through. So while I was putting pictures into books, I felt it was the perfect time to go through this stuff too.

I started with a box full of pictures:

And a small drawer full of pictures:


And here's a couple more stacks...

I went through all the pictures and placed them in order by date, and I've now tucked them away in these books:

The "doubles," including a bunch of extra wedding photos were placed in this blue box, which is much smaller than the brown one from the top. And they were all placed in order with the envelopes labeled.

Now for the challenge. I give you the drawers of death. In these drawers was a combination of scrapbook paper, stickers, empty photo albums, greeting cards, office supplies, keepsake items from birthday parties and other events, even a few cds, and some other stuff. They've been hiding out in my closet (of all places) for the last two years, and it was time for this stuff to go!

(I took pictures of the three individual drawers as well as the contents of the blue box on top, but you really couldn't tell much about them, so I'm leaving these out of the post.)

This set of drawers was completely emptyed! It's a miracle! It had been a cluttered mess for about 2 years, and I finally tackled it. (Now I'm using this set of drawers to store some of my clothes. Yay!)

Now I know your wondering what happened to the contents. First of all, there were a few really nice albums that were empty. So I removed these and placed them on a bookshelf in my office for future use.

The few keepsakes items I had were placed in a little plastic shoebox. The greeting cards were filed away in my file cabinet. (Eventually I'm going to put the cards in a book and possibly use some of them for projects.)

And the office supplies and a lot of the other items were either thrown away, placed in the yard sale box, or moved to various locations in my office. (In fact, at this time, I also took the opportunity to organize my extra/reserve office supplies, which I'll have to share at a later time.)

I also had a whole shoebox of these little photo books that come with your prints. Over half of these had photos in them until last year when I decided to put them into large albums. Now I have no use for these, so I placed them in the yard sale box.

And all my scrapbooking supplies are now in this more compact 12X12 3-drawer bin.

Head over to Org Junkie to see how others organized their pictures and memorbilia. And don't forget to read my post on Picture Organizing Tips.

-Jerri