Drum roll please….today is the recap from my first Monthly Organizing Challenge! Not sure what I’m talking about? Let me bring you up to speed. Here was the challenge that I threw out at the beginning of March.

Organizing Challenge {No.1}

We are going to attack ONE area that NEEDS to be organized. Together! (Notice there’s no me in there – it’s a WE!) Pick a place that you have been neglecting for a LONG time. This could be an under the stairs area, a guest room closet, or if you are like me, it will be a dumping ground piece of furniture. (Also known as my hope chest.)

Meet my Organizing Challenge Project – my hope chest.

Here were my specific goals and my recap is listed in the grey font. (Ahh…progress feels soooo good!)

1-Move the picture to my office. It is a sentimental picture that my mother in law painted and I want to have it in my office as a reminder of her love while I’m working. (Eventually I want to re-frame it too.) In its place I want to do a black and white canvas from our family photos. (A project almost two years in the making.)

The picture is moved to my office. I have to still get it re-framed. I have chosen the black and white picture that I want to have printed on a canvas and will order it this week to go above the updated hope chest.

2-Paint the hope chest black. It will make a better “pop!” Then I want to add some pillows on top of the chest to soften and add some color.

This step was A LOT of work. We started by buying paint at a Portuguese paint store. (I had to bring my hubby to help with the translating.) Actually turns out that the shopping was the easy part! Then it was sanding, priming and painting. Of course we had a rain storm during the process and the porch that the chest was on (the covered porch) didn’t provide enough shelter. We had to move it inside to our laundry room and I finished painting it down there. I also got some great help from my little B. I am really happy with how the color looks.

3-Purge the entire chest and organize it so that it is a better place to store my memories. I’ll need to carve out some time as look through things I haven’t looked at in years.

I was not looking forward to this part. This was the part that I knew would not be as “fun” and would require a lot of time. I started by pulling everything out and putting it in two laundry baskets. What started out as two FULL laundry baskets slowly became one. There were many things that just needed to be recycled.

Once I knew how much I needed to really store in the hope chest I went shopping! IKEA time baby! (I measured the size of the chest before shopping to make sure that I would get the right sized items to properly store the memories.)

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I found these great Kassett boxes I bought one set of the large size and one set of the medium size. All for around $20. They are not super durable but durable enough to hold long term storage in an organized fashion!

They were deep enough to hold larger items like my year books and large photo albums.

Check out the before…

The middle…

And the after…four boxes + memories = organization station!

I have realized that I need to do a secondary post to better break down the full organizational process I used to to organize my memories in my hope chest. I will be adding a post soon to my Managing Memories Series that will include the step by step of how I made this work and how I decided what to keep and not to keep.

If you want other tips for Managing Memories you may check out these posts.