Old IKEA Trivet + Tea Box = Jewelry organizer

Even for a woman like me with not too many (I stubbornly insist) pieces of jewelry, there comes a time when some organization is simply important. For one, I cannot for the life of me remember the pieces I have and therefore land up wearing the same-old, same-old pieces of jewelry over and over again. Finally this summer was the year when I got to sorting out all of my dangling pieces that have hooks.

I converted an old tea box with a plexi glass door into a jewelry organizer. At first I simply used this as is, with the cardboard partitions that were used to separate the individual tea sachets to separators for jewelry. But that really did not keep the ear rings in their intended place. Unfortunately, I have no pics of that mess.

Remember the other trivet that was turned into a doorway key organizer? (Click here if you don't). I had another one saved up inside and it was in worse (or better) shape, because all of the crisscrossing pieces of wood had come un-done. I simply hot glued 4 of them in a staggered fashion like below and screwed on the hooks. Then I hung up the ear rings and rings. Done. Just be warned that screwing the hooks onto the wood could give you blisters!

Old Tea box with plexiglass door converted to ear-ring and ring organizer

Staggering the pieces of wood gave me the ability to hand longer pieces on the end and shorter ones in the middle!

You can tell I got tired of screwing those hooks towards the end!

I plan on hanging it vertically on the wall. So easy to just take one look and know what you have. I do have to make a few more for the chains and necklaces and also the ones that have no hooks to hang them by!

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Organizing the Kitchen -- An IKEA hack

I guess I am really sick of all the lack of organization in my home in general. So, I am on a mission to use as much of my wall space as is possible for my storage needs. This is how it looks like now:

There was this little corner in the kitchen where I used to have a corner planter-shelf thing where I stored my onions, garlic, banana and such like. That did not last long because I started to buy more stuff than that plant stand could take and besides, when Dufus got nervous, the plant stand migrated to the center of the room and the onions were usually rolling around on the floor by the time I got back from work!

So the plant stand was replaced by a side table that was far too big for its intended spot. I lived with that for a really long time, for only one reason, Dufus could not get stuff out of it. It was awkward and taking up too much space and it really had to change. Finally the time for change came tonight!

I used IKEA fintorp series of rods and hooks and then their napkin holders to hold my garlic and oranges. Their Bygel series of rods and hooks were on sale, but I wanted something that looked nicer than the Bygel, so I went with Fintorp. I did use some Bygel hooks to adapt the fintorp hooks to the Bygel basket for my yam (or is it sweet potato?). The remaining (empty) fintorp hooks will serve as a banana holder when I do have some banana to hang!!

The Bygel hook also came in handy to hang one of the two over sized cumbersome pots on this system.

I also bought the Fintorp dish rack to use as my onion holder, but I found that this had to be directly mounted on the wall. So this is where it went

The painting was bought on my trip to South Africa two years ago from people living in a project. The canvas was a bit dirty and it did not come with any framing. But, I loved the simplicity of the strokes in the painting and so just had to buy it. I made the "frame" for that painting using some satin ribbon, fabric spray on glue and PVC piping. I will post a how to on it sometime later.

Here are some more views of my latest pride and joy!! :)

Now that empty wall over the rods looks rather bare doesn't it? Well, I have something up my sleeve for that space!

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.