In June of 2006, our home was struck by lightning. Because of this disaster, my old scrapbook area was destroyed. During the remodeling, my husband and I decided to finish our uncompleted upstairs. This meant that I was going to have a new space for my studio but with one major design flaw: all of the walls were partial, inclined, contained pocket doors, or floor to ceiling windows with no in-room closet!

Beauty With A Repurpose Beginner Project By: Nicole Petersen Zoom in to view this project closer Make this project: Step-by-step instructions Mail a link to this project to a friend

 

To meet this challenge, I decided to purchase lightweight, economical objects that could be screwed to the portions of the walls that could support organizational units. All of these finds could only take up a small amount of space but had to have a big design punch.

Beauty With A Repurpose Beginner Project By: Nicole Petersen Zoom in to view this project closer Make this project: Step-by-step instructions Mail a link to this project to a friend

 

One of these found objects was a broken, two-shelf box from a local craft store on clearance for $2. It had one door missing and the remaining door contained cracked glass. I pulled out my pliers, ripped off the one remaining door, and wiggled out the remaining nails. Voila! I now had a lightweight, functional storage solution.

Beauty With A Repurpose Beginner Project By: Nicole Petersen Zoom in to view this project closer Make this project: Step-by-step instructions Mail a link to this project to a friend

 

This fun, stackable container now holds numerous spools of ribbon and fibers in all shapes and sizes! Scrapbookers and crafters are always searching for decorative items to organize and hold buttons, embellishments, needles, and ribbon. My shelf meets this need for storage, but it allowed me to repurpose a broken, discounted shelf in a way that brings beauty and function into my creative space and life.

Nicole Petersen is a mother, wife, elementary school teacher, and avid scrapbooker/paper-crafter. She lives 35 minutes from New Orleans in South Louisiana with her husband, daughter, and five pets. Organization is a passion of Nicole’s with her scrapbook room as the latest obsession. As a lss scrapbook teacher and design team member, she has taught many women how to expressive themselves through memory keeping. Scrapbooking was a natural fit for Nicole’s lifestyle – her husband is a professional photographer. You can view her scrapbook room as seen in October 2006 edition of Creating Keepsakes or her blog: www.aplaceformescraplog.wordpress.com.

To find the products mentioned in this article and shown in these layouts, check with your local scrapbook retailer. Browse our Premier Retail Stores for coupons to a store near you.