My Love Affair with my Label Maker

Generally I believe that you do not have to spend money to be domestically organized. Occasionally there are circumstances where a few plastic bins or a set of shelves are absolutely necessary but beyond that there is no need to spend kazoodles of dollars on organizational tools. If you want to hire California Closets consultant and spend a thousand or so on a new pretty closet go ahead, but spending a lot of money is not necessary to enjoy an organized home. I love to organize people’s closets, kitchen cupboards, basements, etc. but I can not promise that it will look like a California Closets magazine ad. I can promise you that I will make it work for you. I am driven by functionality alone.

With all that said, I do own a money sucking organizational tool that I am in-love with. I LOVE my completely unnecessary label maker. You can get a Brother label maker on sale at Office Max for $20 or less. It is one of those items that goes on sale around every 6 weeks so do not pay full price. The refill cartridges are around $10 and that is what makes it a money sucker, however, once you have everything labeled in your house then you don’t use it all that much and the cartridges can last quite a long time.

I label anything and everything that makes sense and then even the things that don’t make sense. My friend Amy watched as I labeled my soup shelf “Soup” and said, “because you can’t tell which shelf the soup is on?” Good point. But I still love the label. It’s like jewelry to an organized cupboard to me. Whenever I label something unnecessary and my husband is around to witness it, when I put my beloved label maker back in the kitchen drawer he opens the drawer, takes out the label maker, and turns it upside down searching for the label that says, “label maker." (I actually had a label on one at work once. The label said, "Jenn's Label Maker.") He has made the mistake of saying “why don’t you label it then” a few times when I complain that he doesn’t put things back where he got them like the jam from the fridge. There is now a shelf in our fridge labeled “Jam.” It doesn’t help his bad habits though. I suppose it’s a good thing he is lackadaisical about such things. I can not imagine two A type labeling freaks sharing a home harmoniously.

This is a picture of my upstairs hall closet. I have medicines and such up high since I have little ones in the house. I am sure they could climb the shelves in they really wanted to but it hasn’t happened yet. This closet is one of my prettier closets. It makes me happy when I open the doors. Can you see the sparkling jewels on each bin?