Apparently the end of 2011 has turned me into a "project" freak. Here's another project I started last night -- operation organize the nail polish. I have a nail polish situation to say the least...
I know to those of you who aren't nail polish lovers this seems like a lot and it is but I've seen way bigger collections, but let's just say that it's big enough to need some organization. So I found every single bottle I own, put them all on a fold out table in my living room, and got started.
The first thing I did was sort the polishes by color:
Purples, greens, yellows, blues, and teals
Oranges, reds, pinks, and multi (glitters with more than one color)
And finally neutrals, metallic and clear coats
The drawers I keep my polish in are called melmers, they are those white scrapbooking paper storage drawers that you can get at Michael's They look like this. I lined my drawers with non-slip shelf liner to keep the bottles from sliding around. Right now, the whole collection fits in the three drawers and I have a little space to grow. If it gets any bigger I'm going to move them all to the container store shoe boxes, one color per box.
I also have these nail color wheels that I use to swatch every color I buy. These help me see all my colors at a glance without having to dig through drawers when I want to do a manicure. My manicures rarely involve only one color so its nice to be able to see things paired together in actual swatches of color.
Then what did my geeky librarian self do? I created a google docs form and spreadsheet for entering in all my polishes.
You all know how much I love utilizing google docs from my wedding (we used them for everything!). And now that I have an iPad I love it even more. I can take that or my iPhone to the store with me and look to see if I already have a color and even enter stuff in as I buy it. Since there is a time-stamp that shows when the new entry was added, it will time-stamp when polishes were purchased if I add them close to the date of purchase. I can even share my spreadsheet with a friend so they can see what colors I have.
I'm trying to add this to the google template gallery so you all can use it too but I'm having issues with it right now. For some reason the form isn't wanting to work on the template version but works fine on my version. So if you have a massive nail polish collection and want my template let me know and I'll share a copy of it with you. I'll add a link to the template once I get it working.
I'll let you know how it all turns out. I have to work fast because it is taking up valuable living room space (aka Dash running around space).
I'm also getting the bug to minimize my wardrobe. This blog post has been something I continually think about. I think of Diana as being a fashionable person and if she can get by with a minimal wardrobe, so can I! I don't HAVE to have a new outfit for every occasion. Anyway that's another post for another day... If I can talk myself into it. As you can see from my nail polish issue, minimalism is not my forte.
Are you a generally organzied person or someone who goes through waves of organization? I'm totally a waves person. I'm great at organizing, but keeping everything in its place is really hard!!! I really WANT to be the type of person that doesn't care about things and has so little that organization is easy, but that's just not me (hello boarderline hoarder personality).
*sorry about the iPhone photos. I wasn't really planning on doing a blog post about this but it ended up being a much bigger deal than I planned -- story of my life!
