As promised, I’ve been trying to make time for myself to do more things that keep me sane: baking (and mmm eating), and projects around the house DIY-style. Have you been on pinterest yet? (Leave a comment if you need an invite, I’ll send you one). It is a DIY junkie’s drug of choice. However one of my pet peeves is seeing all sorts of beautiful “DIY” (cough cough) projects that:

a) I have none of the supplies for,
b) aforementioned supplies are stupidly expensive (I am cheap-o) or impossible to find in small town Squamish (ex-nay on the city trips please), and
c) require more time than a couple of naps worth.

This is NOT one of those projects.

This is incredibly easy. First, I am an organizational junkie. I have spreadsheets, and lists all over the house, as well as a dayplanner. Second, I need to be able to write things down on the fly, as I have a little sassy-boots that is demanding 100% of my attention lately, and lack of sleep makes me incredibly forgetful. But my mess of a system was driving me crazy – the true definition of organized chaos.

I took some inspiration from SAS Interiors and a few other pinners to make my own “central command”. All you need are:

- Old picture frames (I have a ridiculous number of these)
- Any type of scrapbooking paper, wallpaper, or even giftwrap! (I grabbed a pack of scrapbooking paper on sale for 7$, came with letters and stickers to boot!)
- A computer printer if you want to print out a blank monthly calendar.
- Some sort of adhesive – I used the sticky tack stuff you use to hand posters, so that I could easily reposition and fiddle around (I am bad a making decisions, like to fiddle around)

The magic discovery for this project is that the glass from the picture frames acts as the white board for the dry erase markers! (who knew). So whatever you choose to place in your frame becomes your background or template, and then you can easily write on and wipe off the glass as you choose. In the words of Don Cherry – BEAUTY!

First I printed off a blank calendar month from an excel spreadsheet, and played around with the positioning, deciding where in the frame/matting I wanted it to be set.

Then the fun begins, fiddle around with your scrapbooking paper or gift wrap, to make it pretty! I used some pretty neutral colours as this was in the main room of our house, but if you wanted to make a cute “to do” list for your kids bedroom, you could really go crazy with colours :)

Then simply place into your frame and VOILA! I left a spot to write the month at the top for convenience.

I also made a To-Do and To-Buy (grocery) list in a second frame, to hang beside this one. This keeps everything all in one spot, especially important for busy husbands who don’t want to go running all over the house to leave me a note that we are out of coffee (sorry hubby).

I will also likely use two more of my smaller picture frames to place our cleaning schedule (I know, how anal, but otherwise I can’t remember the last time the toilet got cleaned…), and meal planning/weekly menus (keeps our grocery bill down), but I want to use something a bit more bright and colourful so will go searching in my giftwrap stash for that project. I’ll be sure to post an update once these are in action.

Because I had most of the supplies lying around the house, the only $ I invested was the $7 for my pretty scrapbooking paper! Just purchasing a whiteboard from a stationary supply store will usually run you more than that. Two points for the redhead – saving money, and making something pretty!