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  • Hi, I’m Emily

    Emily Fazio

    I'm a home improvement enthusiast, living a very merry DIY lifestyle.

    You can find me writing for HGTV and DIY Network, follow me on facebook and instagram, or drop me a note if you'd like. I love notes.

    Thanks for visiting!

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My Photos Runneth Over

November 23, 2011

Yes, I came back for a second quickie post this afternoon, just to notate that I crossed another little thing off my November To-Do list. Wham, bam, that list owns me (but keeps me in ship-shape like nothing else).

I’m one of those girls who still gets photos printed periodically, but I haven’t had a great organizational system in years because I tired of buying photo albums that I never flipped through. (I print via Snapfish, and have for a full decade, pre-HP, pre-Yahoo acquisitions. Second only to zappos.com, I’ve had the best customer service experiences ever, and I’d recommend Snapfish to anyone… and if you want a referral it’ll get me free prints… HI, contact me.)

The photos on my guest room shelf were beyond sloppy; they were cascading, had no order. And also were bent, backwards, and somehow, sticky. I also can’t explain how pictures of my friend’s baby and Christmas 1996 got mixed in with photos from our recent trip to Mexico, it’s like little gnomes sneak up the stairs and shuffle them together at night

Photo chaos. Time to get this under control.

I waited until I JoAnn’s launched another one of their 50% sales that knock the price of photo boxes from $3.99/box to $1.99/box. Because I had an additional 20% off coupon that applied against sale prices, my cost-per was reduced to $1.60, and I brought home a set of four for a sweet $6.50 instead of $16.00. Extreme.

Good deal. Four matching photo boxes.

I end up making picture-sorting an all-day process, somehow getting caught up in each photo, reminiscing or questioning if I should throw a photo out because I look terrible. It also takes awhile because I handwrite simple dates, names, details on the back edge of every print in ink for obvious reasons, and I had missed doing so to some recent orders. I hope you all do that too, because it’s annoying to look through other people’s unlabeled photos, people, and someone’s bound to be looking through those boxes someday.

Not that it has tremendous bearing to you, since we all have different pictures of different things, but I broke down my stacks like this:

  • Winters Family Photos (my immediate family, 1980’s-2000’s)
  • 2000-2010 (Excluding immediate family, mostly accounts for high school, college, and post-college years. Photos of friends, if you will.)
  • 2010-  (photos of vacations with Pete, home projects, recent events)
  • No-people photos (I take a lot of object and landscape images; when it comes to wanting to frame something new it’s easier to have them in one place.)

The clean brown boxes I chose felt more studly than many of the brightly colored boxes they also had in stock; I really like the craft paper texture, and like even more that the inside of each box is a sleek black. A white exterior was also an option, but the ones in stock all seemed to have oddly discolored yellow patches, so I aborted that plan.

Pretty brown paper, prettier black lining.

Once I broke down my four categories, I chopped apart a few paint chips and used them as labels to add pops of color to the neutral brown. Almost all four fit on the top shelf of the pink cabinet in the office, out of the way until I find a permanent home for them.

With one more thing organized, I’m feeling ready to bear down on holiday cooking.

Sorted.

Anyone else doing last minute organizing to pretend your house is orderly before family shows up for Thanksgiving?

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Decor  / Office Space  / Organized

Emily
I'm a home improvement enthusiast, living a very merry DIY lifestyle. I've been a freelancer writer for 10+ years and you can find my work on popular home and garden sites, like HGTV.com. Follow me on facebook and instagram, or drop me a note.

4 Comments


Taylor
November 23, 2011 at 4:30 pm
Reply

Me me me! I use snapfish too and recently underwent a photo project in which I printed and put everything into albums. Its nice to get those photos organized!



    Emily
    November 23, 2011 at 4:36 pm

    Awesome! Snapfish friends. High five!

Kate
November 23, 2011 at 5:57 pm
Reply

Awesome job scoring a sale+coupon deal! I always think I should do that, but inevitably my impatience wins out and I buy what I want too soon :) I don’t have many printed photos, but I definitely have the electronic version of “cascading piles of photos” on my laptop. I need to get organized!



    Emily
    November 24, 2011 at 9:38 am

    My online photos are a disaster. The photos I use for the blog are orderly, but when I switched my iPhoto albums to my new computer they transferred… in triplicate. Not even sure how that happened, but if you know of any photo org programs other than iPhoto, let me know.

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  • HI, I’m Emily

    Emily Fazio

    I'm a home improvement enthusiast, living a very merry DIY lifestyle. Follow me on facebook and instagram, or drop me a note if you'd like. I love notes.

    Thanks for visiting!

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