Desk organization: Making the most of (new) limited storage

In our attempts to get our house ready for Baby Awesomerod's arrival (in six weeks!) one truth has become increasingly apparent: we have less space. Specifically, at this moment, we have less storage. When one of your bedrooms is taken over by baby stuff and you basically have to figure out how to lose a room in your house without cluttering up the rest of the house, it's time to start getting creative.

You might recall that our desk underwent a major downsizing this summer when we switched from a large, old IKEA desk to a very small but quite functional Target desk. This also means the original desk of four drawers and a large attached filing cabinet area has been narrowed down to a desk of one narrow drawer. I've had to store paper products in the guest room's nightstand, which is fine considering that piece of furniture was completely empty before. I've also abandoned my long-standing cord organization system and reduced it down to the bare essentials inside our new small desk.

Until this weekend, the inside of the new desk looked like this:

Not bad, right? I've taken the items I use most often and kept them within easy reach.

But the new cord/charger system was still getting on my nerves.

And my mismatched mini containers inside the drawer were all different heights, and one in particular kept scraping against the inside of the top of the drawer every time I'd open it.

So over the weekend I took a trip to the happiest place on earth -- aka The Container Store -- and used a gift certificate my fantastic senior students from last year gifted me (thanks again, guys!). Among many other things, mostly for the baby, that I picked up there is this 6-piece acrylic desk organizer that is absolutely perfect for the width and height of my drawer. I had no idea if it would fit or not while I was in the store (I forgot to write down the dimensions in my handy little notebook) but I took a quick estimate and was pleasantly surprised to discover that I'd found perfection. (Fun fact, speaking of my notebook: I was looking inside my notebook at my list of items to pick up and dimensions to keep in mind when a Container Store employee stopped me and said, "Wow, a whole notebook, I am really impressed with your organization!" You know you've made it when a Container Store employee makes that comment.)

Although it's not a major change, having a better cord solution is already making finding my camera accessories a little easier. I'll share more of my Container Store acquisitions soon. All I can say is it's a good thing that store is not particularly convenient to my house.

$4 cord solution

I left off with our new office space telling you that it was almost complete, minus one small problem: cords. In abundance. That needed to be contained. What I anticipated could be a tricky issue to solve wound up being a pretty easy fix, thanks to a visit to Home Depot and a knowledgeable, friendly salesman.

Our salesman told us he always uses mounting bases and 8 inch mounting ties to contain his cords. The ones we bought from Home Depot are made by a company called Commercial Electric, and a pack of 10 mounting bases costs $1.99, as does a pack of 10 mounting ties. Although I can't find the exact replica of the mounting base on the Home Depot website, these mounting bases give you the same idea.


First, I had to tightly bundle the computer cords at the source in the back of the computer.

Then I had to space out the mounting bases along the back of the desk and loop the mounting ties through each base. The mounting bases have an adhesive back, and the mounting ties loop through the holes in the bases. The bases are also convenient because the ties can go through either vertically or horizontally, which is great for moving around corners on furniture or walls.

The bigger question I faced, though, once I got started was what to do with the power cord and the bottoms of all the cords when I got to the end.  I had picked up some cute red containers at Home Goods last weekend, and I was planning to use one for this purpose, but the design of the container made the cords still look messy. So, I did what I've increasingly learned to do lately and got resourceful "shopping" my own home. I picked up a basket, one of three housed underneath our living room coffee table, and discovered that it's the perfect size. Plus, its lid, its holes on the sides that serve as handles and its loose weave make it ideal for housing something electric without posing a fire hazard.

Twenty minutes and four dollars later, I was really satisfied with the results.

Granted, it's only been less than a week, but so far I am loving having my work station in the living room. It makes us more of a cozy little family.

IKEA desk attempt abandoned, Target wins!

Back in mid-July I told you we had settled on the IKEA Leksvik small desk for our living-room-turned-office-space revamp. It was the perfect size and a good style for our space, but after nearly a month of it being out of stock at the three area IKEA stores, I was getting antsy, and the large desk in our soon-to-be nursery space was the one thing standing in the way of making nursery progress.

So, during my shopping with Lindsay Sunday extravaganza I spotted a small espresso colored desk at Target, saw the $100 price tag, which is $30 less than that for the similar IKEA desk, and within an hour Matt and I returned to Target so he could check it out, too. Not surprisingly, he was immediately on board, as his motto with all things home decor related is, "If you think it's good, I defer to you." This works for our relationship.

We brought home the Carson Anywhere Desk in Espresso finish, and Matt assembled it by himself while I ate a (heavy) mid-afternoon snack and read the entire birth story post series over at OhApostrophe, the latest blog I've started reading.

Here's the new desk in its new living room home...

If you have a keen eye, you've no doubt picked out my greatest pet peeve present in that photo. That's right, out of control cords. We don't even have that many cords, but they are all quite visible, and as the desk is one of the first items you see when you arrive on our second (and main) floor, these need to be contained. We have a few ideas for hiding them, but I'd love any of your suggestions.

The old table that used to be in the living room has been separated from its legs and is now taking up the remaining area in our crawl space, and we're crossing our fingers that someone will want both our old desk and old chair we're advertising on Craigslist (and would love to make $100 total to mean we could possibly break even with the new desk purchase). Now the living room is much more open (even with the addition of another new-to-us piece of furniture...my childhood toy box that we picked up from my parents this weekend).

Before

After (though still quite a work-in-progress)

Picture the open space occupied with a playmat, quilt with some toys (and a baby!) and maybe even an Exersaucer to boot, and you might have a preview of our future. For now, we're loving the open space and the fact that I can basically never leave the second floor of our house and be totally content.

IKEA desk attempt #1

Yesterday I left off telling you that I was off to IKEA to look for a desk. I had the desk in mind and it even appeared to be in stock, according to IKEA's website, but when we actually showed up at the store we were disappointed to find out the desk is currently out of stock. It was not all for nothing, though, as we walked out with lots of cheap, good-smelling candles, which are always nice to have on hand.

We need a new desk as we prepare for the office to become the nursery. The office currently houses this great condition, nice but too big IKEA desk that I bought back in 2003 straight out of college. IKEA does not appear to even sell this desk anymore (but someone please correct me if I'm wrong! I don't even know what it's called).

This is where the magic happens. And the screen is this blog that I am currently writing -- how meta is that??

This desk is 55" wide and 23.5" deep. We need something of similar depth but only a little more than half the width. Losing that width means I'll be sacrificing the desk's excellent storage capacity, but I already have a plan for getting the desk's contents into the guest room closet. We'll be Craigslisting the desk and the bulky but otherwise perfect chair in hopes of making back a few bucks. (Also, remember how I told you before that I spent zero time decorating the office in anticipation of turning it into the nursery? See what I mean? It's so boring, right?)

Because I'll be taking a decent amount of time off work to stay home with Baby Awesome-rod, I wanted to make sure that we moved the desktop computer to a central location in our home. In my mind, having a baby play area set up in the same area as a small desk seemed like the ideal situation. The best location for this space in our house is the main level, which is where we have the family room, kitchen, eat-in kitchen area and dining room. Technically, we use the eat-in kitchen area (where I hung our European trip photo gallery last summer) as our formal dining room, and we were gifted a very nice table and chairs that currently take up the space of our other dining area. This other dining space is really just wasted potential, and its central location makes it the perfect mini-office/play area.

I'm not sure yet if we'll position the new desk near the bookcase or place it on the right-hand wall, but it could work in either location. We'll be adding to the mix my childhood toy box that's still in great condition and still housed at my parents' house, as well as my childhood mini rocking chair. These three items combined take up approximately the same space as the current table and chairs. We don't want to get rid of the great-quality table and chairs, so we'll take the legs off the table and store everything in either our garage or our crawl space. This dining set would be perfect in a future home.

So, back to the desk. What did I decide on? After much searching, and no luck with Craigslist (most people own really big desks!) I went with the smaller IKEA Leksvik desk in a dark finish. It's 31.75" wide (compared to the 55" width of our current desk) and 20.5" deep (compared to the 23.5" depth of our current desk). We're losing some depth, which is OK, but the width is absolutely perfect. Plus, if the mini-office/play area concept winds up not working out for our lifestyle when Baby Awesome-rod arrives, I have a back-up plan! This desk perfectly fits in a small nook next to our half bath, also on our main level, so all is good with the world.

At $129 the price is right. Now I just have to wait two weeks for the next shipment to make its way to our local IKEA, and then I'll be ready to start moving some furniture.

Tip 44: DIY pen holders

Well, the verdict is in: You all love your popcorn almost as much as I do! Christine suggests truffle salt (a rare delicacy!) and Kim suggests dressing your kernels in olive oil, salt and pepper. I tried Kim's tip this afternoon while Matt and I watched Lost from last night (thank goodness it was so much better than last week's episode!) and I have to say, I love Kim's idea. Matt adds that he appreciates the somewhat fruity flavor the olive oil provides.

After your popcorn snack, you might be deciding it's time for a tiny project. My dilemma recently was pen and pencil storage in our desk. I de-cluttered a desk drawer and then didn't have a good system for holding all my writing utensils. So then I found a sturdy and somewhat pretty empty box that used to contain Ginger Bath Candy from Origins. (The store does not appear to carry this product anymore, but let me recommend the Ginger Float bubble bath and the Ginger Body Scrub.) I threw all my pens and pencils in this box, but I still wasn't satisfied, until I looked at a piece of cardboard and found inspiration...

Tip 44: To divide up larger containers, use pieces of cardboard as free, simple, sturdy and (best of all) green dividers.

Here's what I did:

1) Find a piece of cardboard that is approximately the right size. I chose a top flap of a Crate and Barrel box and lined it up next to my empty Origins container.

2) Cut a piece of cardboard to fit the width of the box as snug as possible.

3) Now take a second piece of cardboard. As you cut this piece, it should be slightly taller and slightly more narrow than the original piece. The reason for this difference is that this piece is going to fit over the original piece. Once the cardboard is approximately the right size, cut a slit right down the middle.

4) Fit this new piece of cardboard on top of the original piece of cardboard. Getting this perfect will require keeping the scissors handy and cutting bits and pieces at a time, but it shouldn't be too difficult. Now put it all together!

5) Now I essentially have four boxes in one, perfect for arranging my supplies into categories: highlighters, pens, pencils and teacher pens (you know, fancy colors to make students see your comments).

Before you put your pens in place, now is an excellent time to perform a pen purge. At some point Matt added about five boxes of pens -- mostly boring Bic pens which I hate -- to our desk drawer. Because I hate these pens, I had ignored them for the past three or more years. And then the other day I went through them and got rid of a ton that did not work. Behold, the soon-to-be-disposed pens:

For my next mini project I think I will try this on a slightly larger scale. I'd love to make dividers for my sock and tights drawer, so this might be an effective strategy. Of course, if you don't want to do this yourself there are plenty of products already out there, such as this honeycomb-shaped drawer organizer from Real Simple (available at Bed Bath and Beyond for $8.99).

Next up...A Tale of Two Bedsheets, or how to find better-quality linens.