Got my new toy, umm... storage solution!

Well, when I got to home depot they had two choices and I preferred this one. It's actually pretty cool! The top box is a typical tool chest, the middle section (which you can snap completely off too) is two metal drawers, and the bottom is a big storage comparment that has a tipping door... opens like a neighborhood mailbox (do they have neighborhood mailboxes any more?). The handle works just like a piece of luggage and can be stowed to make it more compact. It is all wrapped in stainless steel but is still very lightweight. It's not like those big, heavy Craftsman rolling toolboxes. We have one of those too for "real" tools and we LOVE it. I still don't know how I'm going to organize it, but it will be fun. I must be one of the only people on the planet who LIKE organizing things. I usually have very good organizational skills... I just tend to be slow in GETTING things organized... I won't tuck things willy nilly until I HAVE a home for it... which means we do always tend to have a small pile of somethign waiting for a permanent home.

I think I had to get better organized because we have almost ALWAYS lived in a smaller space than we needed really. Hmm... that wasn't true for the last place we lived... and sort of true for the time before. I had my kitchen very well organized and our closets very well organized because those spaces were small, but we had full basement storage before, so I never had to be very organized in the basement until we moved here. Now, we really don't have a basement because most of it is finished living space. When we moved here I got rid of a LOT of long term storage, but we still had WAY too much. Since then, over the course of the last year I have whittled that down another 50% and have for the most part reorganized all storage boxes to consolidate what's left. I have a bit more work do to with that, but now we have "room to spare" for awhile at least. As a matter of fact, our storage room now has working space. I might make that my "cake" room too. We hung some of our old kitchen cabinets in their, so I can store some things down there and do the details of the cake - the part that makes a HUGE mess of my kitchen to keep my "cake" mess separate from the normal daily dealings of the kitchen. It will be especially useful for the cake projector! That thing is HUGE! I'll have to see - carrying a cake up and downstairs isn't much fun either. I just would really like to contain the mess of cake decorating a bit. I TRY to do things as I go, but when you get to mixing colors, and needing different tips for different designs, in the last bit of making the cake, you manage to pretty much cover all working space in bags, tips, bowls and spoons all with very colorful buttercream and, possibly fondant! I think it's the MESS of making decorated cakes that gets people to buying them from someone else and I understand it.... it's a VERY messy job!

OK... I think I've now bored you to tears, but I'm thinking this whole thing through to make sure I have it all straight in my OWN heady before I set about doing anything about it!