File Cabinet Project

This was a great find! After my friend Phyllis told me about her purchasing a file cabinet to house her unmounted stamps, I just knew I had to follow suit. Her and I have been working on a way to store our vast collection for years now. I know that I have 1,000's of unmounteds. To store them is a problem. I've tried envelopes stored in those photo boxes and videocassette tape boxes. I didn't like either way. The envelopes became too cramed in the photo boxes and there was just too many boxes to go through. The VCR tape boxes are good except that I had to dump and find the one I wanted. However, I will say that Red Castle has a great program for making a cover with the stamps on there. But, again, my collection is too large for this storage method to be effective.

So...I am currently converting those VCR boxes to file folders. You know, the good ol' manilla folders. I am stamping on the outside and placing the stamps on the inside. I don't mount my unmounteds. I use naked rubber attached to the block with 3M Poster Tape. Works great. So, inside the file folder, I have just used double sided tape to hold the stamp in place. Seems to be working well except that you do need to be a bit careful when you remove the stamp. It wants to take the tape with it. Some of my UMs are mounted with Halos hook 'n loop tape so I have cut a piece of loop and attached it inside the folder. I'll post a few pics later on how this really works.

For now, here is the file cabinet that I got off of Craigslist for a mere $25. It is a 5-drawer vertical file; however, it is deep. About 3 feet deep! It's a nice, heavy Steelcase model. Can't beat that for the price. It did need a makeover because the color was ugly. It was painted by someone a lighter tan with the sides being the original dark tan/brown.

I started by washing the inside and outside with some Dawn dishsoap. We took the handles and label holders off and then sanded it.

Next, we painted the cabinet with cheap White Enamel paint and the drawer fronts with Pink Enamel. It took two coats.

While that was drying, I went to work on cleaning up the handles and label holders. I used Dawn dish soap, a steel wool pad, and some light sandpaper. Some of the handles had old paint on them that needed the sandpaper to take off. They look great now!

I used some of the scrap patterned cardstock from the plastic drawer project as labels. I love how this turned out!

Catching Up

Well, as usual, you cannot count on me to keep up with posting here. Sheesh, sorry about that. I've recently moved to a new apartment which, is way tooo small. So far, the only good thing that I like about the joint is the underground heated parking. Getting into a 70 degree car vs. 20 below in the winter will be a joy!

Anyhow, here is the new stamping area. The room is really the living room which measures 11 feet wide x 20 feet long. Divide that 20 feet in half and you can all imagine how cramped the space really is. It works I guess but the dream of that lovely, huge space of a stamp room still looms.

Because the room is soooo small, you won't see my paper stash nor my mounted stamp collection here at all. All of that is stored in my bedroom that actually is pretty generous in size. Oh well, I guess I'll survive for now.

This is my "sofa table" consisting of some of my Iris carts. I saw on Splitcoaststampers how some people were dressing up their carts and I just had to case the idea. I really like it.


Here is a close up of the drawers. It is just cardstock cut to fit the drawer fronts (and sides that were visible). I used my Nesties to make labels. Some of the drawers are not labeled because they contain junk that just got dumped in there.

I set up my cabinets along this wall. You'll see I dressed up some more plastic drawers with the same cardstock and labeled them again using my Nesties. These drawers contain all of my embellishments sorted by color.

A closeup of the drawers.

These bookshelves sit behind my desk and are filled with frequently used items. Everything is pretty handy here.

Just another view.

The desk area. It has two drawer units from Ikea that have all my frequently used tools and adhesives in it. Oh yea, there is the pile of stamps that I need to put away too! LOL!!

This picture is a puzzle. I finally put this thing together. I think I won this at my very first rubber stamp convention back in 1998! It was great fun to put together! In the next post, I'll show you my new find.