Impossible Project Update

I've been organizing the island but you know the old saying- that one project leads to the three before it, right? Two of my three projects have turned out to be...

1. Going through old paper sample books and 2. Getting a hold on the magazine situation.

There were quite a few homeless items that had been plunked on the island by default since they had no where else to go. And lately I'd been thinking that I'd just run out of space. Which in all honestly is a ridiculous notion because the room the island's in is only half the space of the entire studio. It's pretty large home workspace of any kind- there was no way I should be running out of room!

So I started to evaluate exactly what I was storing on the shelves and in the built-in cabinet. And realized that a lot of it was leftover from when I used the studio for consultations with wedding invitation clients. I had half a shelf in the built-in full of paper sample books that I don't need anymore. But instead of recycling all that paper I pulled out anything that I liked-

and put it into my paper bins which are sorted by color and divided into "scrap" and "whole sheets".

Some of the sample books were so cool I could see myself using every page so I kept those in tact and put them back on the shelf. But they take up less than half the space the whole collection was taking up before I went through them.

My evaluation of the storage also highlighted that I might have a magazine problem. See the brown and white flowered boxes on the shelves. Those are all magazines. And what you can't see is that on the lowest shelves I have 4 more of those bins. All of them are full and they are taking up lots of space on my shelves.

(And that umm doesn't even count the stack on the chair that started when I ran out of room for these pretty little bins, or the stack I've hidden in the storage ottoman in the living room, or the ones I have on the night stand in the bedroom). Ok, ok my name is Meg and I'm a magazine-aholic.

So I finally put into action a "mini impossible project" that I'd been planning for a while now. I started going through all of the magazines. Clipping out anything I'm remotely interested in, and putting them into categorized binders. Thereby getting rid of all the fluff and ads that I don't need and are just taking up space.

So far I've gone through three boxes of wedding magazines, leftover from when I was planning my wedding (more than 6 years ago) and from when I met with wedding clients. Out of all these I'm hanging on to clippings that total less than 1/4 of the pages in a single magazine!

And after all of this the island is getting there. Slowly but surely I'm seeing surfaces again.

(Sorry for the crappy picture but the light was awful from where I was taking this picture).

P.S. Don't forget you have until tonight (Thursday Jan. 19th) at 11:59 EST to enter my giveaway! Tomorrow I'll announce a winner.