Wednesday, May 27, 2015

The DREADED "Electronics Bag"

There is no other way to put it folks. We have an absolutely DREADED electronics bag.


I'm serious, it's awful. It houses everything electronic and/or workout related because we don't have any were else to put it. It is a total mess and impossible to find what you need without dumping the entire bag. With the new office in the works, I needed to designate some space to organize these items. Thus, I set out to organize the DREADED electronics bag. 

I dove right in and dumped everything out of the bag. Gulp.


I also grabbed a little tray I keep in the bedroom with my commonly used workout related items because I couldn't handle retrieving them from the bag anymore. 


In order to organize this stuff I needed to know what I had, so I laid out everything from the bag. This included but was not limited to...hard drives and thumb drives, computer mouse, SD cards, cell phone case for running, case for sunglasses, cell phone case, mini camera tripod, camera battery charger, two pairs of swim goggles, sports gel, extra run ID strap, numerous sets of headphones, CO2 pump (for filling a bike tube), bicycle light, and a ton of chargers and cables. I can't even breathe. 


Then I added the contents from my 'commonly used items tray'. Hair tie, water proof iPod shuffle case for swimming, heart rate strap, iPod, chap stick, Garmin, Garmin wrist strap, Garmin charger base (no cable in there though lol), and two pairs of sunglasses. 


Sadly, I knew there was more. So I rummaged through The Engineer's stuff and found his commonly used items and a few other things around the house that belonged with this stuff. Thus I added another heart rate strap, pair of headphones, his Garmin, iPhone running case, camera charger, more thumb drives (where did they all come from!?), more SD cards, and a 12V USB charging base. 


Excuse me while I practice some calming breathing techniques or something. These items obviously weren't going to fit all in one place but I wanted to start with a sectioned organizer that would fit our sports gear. I immediately thought of this: 


It's a silverware organizer. It's actually the exact one we use for our silverware in our kitchen.


I liked it because it is short (hence it would fit on the shelf I had planned for it and it had plenty of different compartments. Don't worry, I didn't dump all the silverware in the drawer and steal the one from the kitchen. I went to The Container Store (<3) to get a new one haha! I also knew I could re-purpose the tray that I had been using to store my commonly used items. 


I decided to put our common athletic items in the silverware organizer and all camera related items in the tray. I took my trays to the office to test the space out in the far right cabinet (I did this in the middle of installing countertops haha!). 




I had set the top shelf high just for this purpose. 


The sport equipment organizer fit with room to spare for the camera tray next to it.


When I was testing to see how these would fit on the shelf I noticed that they did not slide very well, and with the countertops installed, the only way to get these in and out would be sliding. Thus, I decided to glue felt on the bottom. I only needed one $0.29 sheet of felt and simply cut it into strips with scissors and glued it around the outside of each tray with a hot glue gun! They slide like a dream now!



I loaded the sports items in the big tray and all the camera stuff in the smaller tray and slid them right into place.



This has helped immensely and I don't want to cry every time I need something. I still need to organize the rest of the office related electronics, but this is a great start.

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