DIY Mail Orgnization

I have a confession: I'm not a tidy person.  Clutter is something that I battle (not successfully, I might add) constantly.  I get easily overwhelmed and just don't know where to start.  Then when I do start, I have two toddlers either undoing my work or needing my attention within 5 minutes of starting.  This leads to lots of piles of mail.  All over.  Which gets really confusing, especially when it's time to pay bills.  So I decided to create an organization center with the family calendar, mail organization, etc. as step one.

I'm going to give a mini-tutorial on how I made my mail organizers out of cereal boxes!

I got a whiteboard calendar for around $10 at Wal Mart, and I turned to cereal boxes for mail organization.  here's what it looks like:

When I get the mail, I open the bills and write the date they're due on one end with a sharpie, then put them in order (soonest to latest) in the bin so it's easy to see what's coming up next .  Miscellaneous goes on the bottom, everything else is tossed.  The coupon bin is actually a baking soda box!  These were super simple to make, here we go:

Cut your box like so.  I used a ruler and pencil to draw out the lines, the back is 1" taller than the front.  Then I just used scissors to follow my lines.

Next, you need to cut out paper to fit.  I used patterned scrapbook paper but you could also paint them or use fabric to cover!  Since they were going up on a wall I only did the front, sides, and bottom, skipping the back and inside.  You can definitely cover more, but I was trying to finish up before bedtime :)

For the smaller coupon box, one sheet of paper worked fine.  For the larger mail boxes I had to cut each piece out because they were too big to fit on one piece.  I just measured out the size of panels I need and drew them out on the paper like this:

I cut along the top and folded along the lighter lines down the sides.

Next, I used solid colored paper to cut out the words using my Silhouette Cameo and put everything together using Mod Podge (regular paper glue would probably work just fine, but I had Mod Podge on hand and thought that it would help the paper stick to the glossy box better).

To attach them to the wall, I used some leftover strips from a package of Command hooks I bought, so they're stable but won't ruin my wall if I want to move or take them down.

I'm really happy with them!  It's a super basic craft, but I'm proud of it :)

~B
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