DIY knock-off medicine boxes

I want these:

But they run $45 GBP each. Each. Which is roughly $75 each USD. Yeah. Not in my budget.

Do you remember how bad the cabinet used to look
with the big plastic bins of medicine?

With 2 large round cardboard boxes from Hobby Lobby (less than 5 bucks each) and some craft paint, I made these knock-offs. They are not metal, and they don't have a lock, but they were a cheap fix:

And now instead of the nasty mess that I linked above, I have this:

The inside of the cabinets are all painted bright, clean white. Everything has fresh shelf paper. Everything is in new binnies ($1 a pop at Walmart). I really love the way everything in the kitchen turned out.

Oh, and to try and keep it organized, I hot-glued little clips on the doors. I attach an index card to each door that shows everyone where everything is at. No more, "Mom, where is the drink mix?" And everyone has been really good about putting things back. No Way, Ted!!!

Plain as day. Drink Mix? Pudding? It is all in there.

I even went through all the medicines and threw out all the expired stuff... I also put together an Emergency Kit in a binny. It has burn gel, band aids, Neosporin, hydrogen peroxide, etc... Everything a mother of 4 crazy little boys needs!

organizing the Hoosier cabinet with shelves and jars...

I did some tidying in my Hoosier cabinet... The inside of the cabinet was never painted very well, so shadows of green paint was showing through. I gave the inside of the flour bin, which Steven has just built shelves in, a good coat of paint. I added shelf paper on the shelves. For the back, I covered green wrapping paper with laminating paper and used double-stick tape to give the inside a fun bit of color. (Above)

I still need to paint the rolling door, called a tambour, compartment. (above) We keep a variety of cereals in these glass cracker jars for the boys.

Here is an older outside shot of the cabinet. For reference... I plan on clearing the clutter from the top... it just seems to gather...

I adore these Martha Stewart labels for labeling the storage jars!

Here is the inside of the Hoosier. Since this was taken, I rounded up a couple more jars for that bottom shelf. Still need to get some of the boy's artwork off the side of the fridge there, huh?

The thing I like most about the Hoosier, besides the organization, is the pull-out enamel counter. When the boys are bickering too much at the table, I will put one or two of them in front of the Hoosier on some stools. Makes meal time a bit more quiet with a bit more elbow-room at the kitchen table. :)

ribboned refrigerator photo display fun...

In the move from our house in Olathe to the yellow house near Liberty, our refrigerator was damaged. It landed face down and the handles that run the entire height of the fridge broke off. I checked into replacement handles at Sears (it's a Kenmore), and they charge $300. Yeah. Being that I want one of those french-drawer fridges in stainless someday, I decided to live with the damaged fridge.

I have been staring (frowning) at the screw holes on the front of the fridge for a couple years now. I hadn't really come up with an ingenious idea for making new handles so I opted to cover the holes. Hey, lack of handles keep the kids out, right? hehehehe.

A couple spools of ribbon and a roll of permanent double-stick tape later, we have covered up the holes, added a little color to the B&W kitchen, and we have a little place to clip pictures of the kids to. I need to dig through our photos, so I just threw a few up that happened to be handy.

And a close-up. You can see the screw holes were not in the most convenient place... hence why the ribbons are so close to the middle there. A top and bottom fridge would work better for this than my side-by-side.

my confession for the week...

Sometimes I think having a big kitchen is more difficult to organize than having a small kitchen. Our kitchen is 21.5 x 15.5 feet... it seems like we have a jillion cabinets. Lots of cabinets is great for storage, but it also means we have WAY to much space for things to collect. You know how easy it is to cram something into a cabinet and shut the door, right?

So I have a confession... I took all the doors off the upper cabinets on one side of my kitchen. The other side, we left them on. The side with the open cabinets are all nicely organized and tidy like these:



The closed cabinets... notsomuch. I never had even bothered to paint the insides of the cabinets. And the doors have these bizarre grooves routed into them:

This cabinet is the worst of them all. This is where the medicine, paper bags, aluminium foil and baggies somehow got shoved into:

So, I started with the "easy" cabinet today. This one already had a bunch of stuff put into binnies. I took all the bins out and painted the inside of the cabinet. While I was waiting for the paint to dry, I put new (clear) contact paper on all the open shelves.

I also organized the binnies a little better. Perhaps I got a little too anal retentive when I organized all the birthday candles into ziplock baggies:

All my sprinkles were already in a binny. I just love cupcakes and sprinkles are a happy thing, aren't they?
Once the paint dried, I lined the shelves of the cabinet and put the binnies back in. It hought about painting the back of the cabinet a bright green, but for now I like the simple white. I will pick up some more pink binnies so they will all match. They are $1.50 at Walmart.

Oh, while the paint was drying, I found the first fun craft to do with that paper I blogged about yesterday...

My grilling spears will never tumble out of the cabinets again! I took an old drink mix container and covered it with some scrapbook paper. I thought about mod-podging it, but just used doublestick tape. Less messy.

1 cabinet down... 5 uppers to go. Not sure I will have the stamina to do 32 lowers. They are tidy, but haven't been painted on the inside... Yikes!

sometimes store-bought IS better than homemade

I have been using my weekly 40 and 50% off coupons at Michaels to pick up some of those really pretty Martha Stewart craft boxes. I have gotten the CD and the Photo boxes. While I was at Wal Mart, I picked up a plain white box and thought -- why not save some money and make my own?

Here you can see my attempt at covering the box. I just used fabric I had laying around and some Mod Podge. It all worked out OK, except once you put the fabric on, it makes it too bulky for the top to fit on right. In order to smoosh the top on, the sides if the box cave in a wee bit. Once you pry that label holder off on the front, the grippers don't want to hold anymore, so you have to hot glue it back on.

Furthermore, the inside of the Martha Stewart boxes are prettier:

I decided that the aggravation of sticky fingers, smooshed in boxes and undecorated insides were not worth it.

The photo box is normally $16... I used a 50% off coupon to make it $8. The craft box at Wal Mart was $5, plus I used about $5 worth of fabric and glue... So, really, with a coupon, it wasn't a savings. I suppose if you HAD to have something in your very favorite fabric, then making your own would be worth it. But since the boxes come in a pretty blue, as well as white, black and brown, I am happy with them as-is.