Scrap Room Tour Part 2: The Expedit

Welcome to the second part of my scrap room tour! If you missed the first part, you can find it (and a lot of other posts about the process of putting it together) here.

Let's take a stroll down the aisles of my Expedit today (and if you want to read about the nutty whirlwind trip that we took to get my Expedit, click here).

This shelf really is the best organizational piece I could have bought for my scrap room. It holds a ton of stuff in a minimal amount of space and is sturdy enough for the shelves to not warp under the weight of all that paper. It's also the perfect size for holding 12x12 papers and albums. I have yet to find another shelf that can do that. Did I mention that it was on sale when I bought it? Yup, got it for a mere $160!

Let's take this shelf by shelf, shall we?

The top shelf houses all of my albums and albums in progress. Let's face it, they're all albums in progress! I am definitely not a chronological scrapper. I just scrap what appeals to me at the time and file it away in the proper binder for the year it fits in.

I use mostly American Crafts 12x12 3-ring binders, but as you can see I have a few post bound (mostly theme/vacation albums) as well. The 3-ring binders make it very easy to insert and remove pages from my albums.

The next row of shelves houses all of my patterned paper. Before I procured the Expedit, I had some paper in Cropper Hopper vertical holders, some in 12x12 Sterilite drawers, and some just laying around. Gasp! Now it's all neatly stored in vertical holders and soooo much easier to go through and find what I need quickly.

I tend to mostly sort by manufacturer and then by lines within a manufacturer, like all my Basic Grey papers above or Sassafras below.

Stacks (such as these DCWV stacks) tend to get left together and outside of a container until I've pulled out too many pages and they start falling apart. Then they get transferred to vertical holders.

I keep my seasonal papers separate, regardless of manufacturer. For instance, my Basic Grey Halloween papers are over in this section instead of with Basic Grey.

Same goes for Christmas stuff.

I keep my cardstock separated by color (except for kraft, which I have so many packs of that I just stuck it in wherever it would fit) in more Cropper Hopper vertical paper holders. 12x12 and 8.5x11 are stored separately.

The next cubby over from the 8.5x11 cardstock contains yet another basket from Wal-Mart. I should have bought some of those pretty wicker ones from IKEA (they are taller and fit the Expedit perfectly), but since it's 4 hours away I can't exactly run back over and pick up a few.

This basket houses my non-alpha flat embellishments such as stickers, border strips, and rub-on sheets. The section up front is for items that I have recently used and newer items that have yet to be put away. Any Thickers in this basket are the shaped ones and not alphabets

Items in the basket are arranged in color order with 8.5x11 chipboard dividers (from the backs of DCWV stacks) between each section.

I mostly leave items in their packages when I put them in here as it helps keep them from getting bent up and keeps stickers from being accidentally peeled off their backing sheets.

I will admit that I'm not very happy with the organization of the basket (from Target) in the next cubby over. It contains all my chipboard sets including some alphabets. I keep some alphabets stored by color in my embellishment drawers that I will share later, but I'm not very happy with that solution, either.

Each set is in a little plastic sandwich baggie to keep it from getting mixed in with the others.

The next row of shelves down mostly holds idea books and magazines, but I squeezed in a few of these CD baskets from Target. One holds my seasonal punches (because they won't fit in the punch basket in my desk).

There's no rhyme or reason to how they're stored in here- Halloween and Christmas and other seasons (I have a shamrock punch in there somewhere) are all jumbled together.

The other three baskets hold my ribbon collection, also sorted by color. Are you catching the theme, here? I totally scrap by color, so that's how most of my items are stored.

All this ribbon used to be on spools, but during a particularly long TDY (6 months in Colorado, much of which was in the winter) I would sit in my apartment with my cat and a good DVD on and wind my ribbon around these cards instead (it didn't take nearly as long as that makes it sound). It is so much easier to find now and takes up a lot less space!

I will admit that I am a complete and total idea book and magazine junkie. They take up nearly the entire fourth row of my Expedit, and these aren't all of them!! Where are the rest, you ask? They are on my MacBook! I need to write a whole separate blog post about it some time, but in a nutshell I have this fabulous sheet-feeding scanner that scans both side of a page at once. I've cut the spines off of most of my magazines and dropped them into the hopper to be imaged. It creates a nice, neat, searchable PDF out of each of them that takes up infinitely less space (and makes it more usable).

But there are some books and magazines that I just can't bear to cut apart, like my massive stack of Scrabook Trends issues. In the last year I've switched over to a digital subscription with them and love it, so I don't have to worry about any more buildup here.

Same with my issues of Cards- I receive them digitally now, as well. The other books in here are among my favorites (many were gifts) and I am leaving them intact rather than scanning them in.

We've made it to the final row of my Expedit. Are you getting tired yet? Whew!

This first cubby holds some of my larger tools. My Xyron, Making Memories trimmer (this is not my everyday trimmer, but is great for trimming photos from the printer), glass mats, and a circle cutter are among the items in here.

The next three cubbies hold both my older scrapbooks and scrapbooks for items such as birthday and Christmas cards that I want to keep. I tend to just stick these items on white cardstock with photo corners, but I still love flipping through them from time to time.

The third cubby for this section is actually empty, but that's because some of my empty binders for this project are still in storage.

Finally, this last section holds albums that are empty, just waiting to be filled. I've picked these up mostly at Hobby Lobby when they are 50% off. Now that I have a few extras, I can avoid those sales for a while. :)

So, do you think I'm totally nuts yet? I think I've made it look like I have a lot more than I really do. I was just having so much fun taking pictures while I was cleaning that I got a little carried away.

Stay tuned for the next installment, where I'll show you where I keep page kits, mini album supplies, and projects that are in progress.