I’m a wannabe neat person. In actual fact, I’m a very messy person. I have to work hard at keeping things tidy and uncluttered, but that is one of my main house related aims in life at the moment. In fact, I really want to do a photograph walk through of my house to post here, but it’s too messy. Some parts are tidy, like the front half is really good at the moment, but other parts like the spare room (aka laundry room) has a suitcase and some linen and the vacuum cleaner that need to be put away. *sigh*

But that is not the point of this post.

I need some advice on how to get more organised in my work space. I’m getting quite good at keeping things in their place (everything needs a “place” otherwise it goes on the desk, on the shelf, on the floor, wherever is handy at the time), but I seem to have a lot of empty space at the moment and I’m not sure how to best utilise it. You can see in the photos below, the built in shelving is not being used to it’s capacity. I have the coloured boxes sitting along the cupboard on purpose to prevent me from putting other junk on there (as you can see it’s only sort of working). They hold different bits and bobs for my handmade things I’m planning on making, and are easy to access, so I’d like to keep them there.

In the middle of making some jewellery for MadlyDeeply.net

Built in shelves and cupboard area, I need a bit more order and structure here

See all those lever arch files on the right? They’re empty. I bought them with the best of intentions to create a filing systems for bills etc, but then I switched from paper bills to online bills, so they’re ready for some other organisational task, I’m just not sure what.

Storage for bits and bobs, fax machine I need to setup, crafting supplies and on the end an empty filing shelf thing (?) which I'm not sure what to do with... maybe I could put decorative papers in here? It's a bit far away from my actual work area though.

I think I could get some more of the coloured boxes to put on the shelves and shove all the loose little things in them to reduce some clutter. And I’m most definitely going to make one of these babies (but all one colour and a little less “rustic” looking) to hold spools of ribbon (Via Mod Podge Rocks):

Which I will put up on one of the shelves, maybe where the empty lever arch files are at the moment.

Dusty Paints - a sign I need to stop surfing and start painting

I needed a place to store the earrings I make on their tags, and this temporary measure is working for now: an old wire coathanger cut and bent to shape. I'll need to think of something a bit better soon though.

Token shot of my desk in a tidy state

Do you have any advice on what else I could do to improve the use of space? Do you have any photos of your own work space? Please share!

I ♥ comments! =)