Organization on a dime

Have you ever heard of Cansolidators? They look pretty handy, right? When I first saw them I thought that they would be the perfect tool for organizing our food storage. The problem is that the smallest ones cost about 30 bucks.
Each. Yeah.
I'm cheap. No, I mean really, really cheap. I've never spent more than 12 dollars for a pair of jeans. All of the furniture in our apartment was either gifted or thrifted. There's no way I'm going to spend 30 dollars for a little platic thing that organizes canned goods, no matter how handy it is. So, instead, I 'organized' our closet like this:

looks nice, right? Heh.
And then, one day I came across this amazing istructable about making furniture out of cardboard, and the wheels started to turn in my head. A quick Google search later, and I was looking at a tutorial about making your own cardboard can rotation system. Awesome! Adam made three of them for us. We didn't follow the diagram on the tutorial, instead using the measurements that worked best for us, but we did like their idea of using a tube of caulk (which we had on hand) instead of elmer's glue. The caulk dries much faster and leaves the finished product a bit sturdier. We also doubled up the cardboard to make sure that it didn't buckle under the weight of our canned goods. So now one small corner of my closet looks nice and tidy. Now I just need Adam to make about a dozen more...



While Adam was making food storage solutions, I made myself a shoerack. And because I just can't resist a chance to turn ANYTHING into an art project, I mod podged scrapbook paper onto it, and then painted it.

So an old diaper box went from this:

To this:


And the pile of shoes behind my door went from this:
to this:
Ah. Much better. As I was making it I had the idea of modifying it a little to make a doll house. You could mod podge pictures of furniture and art from magazines onto it, and make pretty rugs out of scrapbook paper... Anicka and I might be doing something like this together, soon.

And, lastly, here is my progress on my knitting:


It's coming along, slowly but surely. I've made a few mistakes, but overall I'm pleased with it. Hopefully I'll have myself a nice little scarflet in a couple of days.