Apartment Therapy Style Cure Week 3: Organization Porn

For those of you who've been charting my Style Cure progress, I really have been doing the Apartment Therapy Style Cure these past few weeks, but I haven't had much time to blog about it due to auditions (And some juicy ones too! Nashville, Revolution, Anger Management...I can't complain). These weeks have been filled with assignments like "Shop til you drop!" and "Toss and organize." Easier said than done, especially when I'm focused on other stuff. I've slowly been slogging through all of these tasks, with limitations, of course -- we don't actually have enough space in our office to possibly get all the storage we would actually want in here. The room quadruples as two busy people's home offices, line dry laundry hanging space, and a guest room. So, while I would like to get as much feng shui flow in here, the reality is I only gots a 121 square feet. What's a girl to do?

Well, downsize and organize.

After my (failed) floor planning stint, I decided that moving the furniture around would be impossible, given the space we have. So I've made do with small improvements--with ginormous results.

For example, I just slogged through four years of old sides (scripts) from auditions and organized them into these adorbs notebooks from Target:

It's always hard for me to throw out sides...it's like a little memento of all the characters I get to transform into. It was actually kind of fun, looking back on all the weird and cool things I've auditioned for--indie movies that never got made, TV pilots that turned into huge successes (Revolution, Lost, Chicago Fire), and scenes I ran in class that frustrated the hell outta me at the time but now I look back and see right through it. By the way, turns out old sides make for a pretty comfy cat bed:

Remember this awesome leaning tower of paper-za?

I know, I know.

I finally sorted through my boxes of acting postcards, head shots, mailing labels, envelopes, and every possible size of printer paper, and sprung for this cool drawer organizer from Ikea, which doubles as a printer stand and cuts the floor space needed in half. It's aptly named "Alex."

I'm the man of your dreams.

Aah! Doesn't that feel soooo much better? As for our crazy overstuffed bookcases...

Heart. Attack.

God, it gives me agita just to look at this photo. It's. Got. To. Go. Really. I mean, the orange jersey from Key & Peele? The Gummo poster? (As cool as those are, they don't necessarily need to be on display.) The hanging laundry? The book cases? I painted that wall a dark dove gray hoping we could contrast it with some cool white furniture, but it's mainly been obscured by these black Billy Ikea bookcases. I really would've liked to switch these out for white ones, but for now, these will have to do the trick until we move into a house. I considered painting them, but the thought of dragging them outside and having to lay them on their sides sounded like a huge pain. So I settled on making them a little cheerier.

Made a weekend trip to my fave place Paper Source and found me some bright, cheery patterned paper and lined the backs.

Once I put these up altogether, I didn't love the pattern so much anymore. It's more floral and dowdy than I want. But I figured most would be covered up anyway by the books, and hey, it was only $21. I didn't worry too much about lining up the pattern since I knew books would be there:

Used some horizontal stacking and some objects like this vase to break up the lines. I love seeing all the colors of the book spines side by side.

Then I took those gattdam miles and miles of DVDs and Blu-rays clogging up our bookshelves and finally shelled out for their own little condo, using this unused corner:

That one's still in progress, as you can see. But I'm learning now. The key to success is storage, storage, storage! I'm pretty sure that's what the real punch line to that "How do you get to Carnegie Hall" joke is.
Phew!