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Friday

Organising a Gift Wrapping Cart / Station


I like having a selection of wrapping paper and bags in our house ready for when I have to organize a gift for someone or my daughter or son need to wrap items when they are staying with us .

However for quite some time I've been complaining that I couldn't find the items I was sure I had already bought and I seemed to be wasting a lot of time searching around trying to remember where I had put them.

So when I saw a wooden kitchen cart for sale on Facebook marketplace and I knew it was a really good price I had the idea of creating a Gift wrapping Cart or Station as our American friends would call it.







I know I am not the only person who buys things in advance.

I know I am not the only person who puts them away somewhere which seems to be logical.

I know I am not the only person who hunts around frantically looking for the items I bought and put away in a logical place but now I can't find them.

Obviously I am not as organised as I would like to be or need to be.


So I really needed to organise my wrapping paper and gift bags

I had made a first attempt at getting everything together some months before I saw the kitchen cart advertised but it was not a great success.

The bags had been gathered up and put into this plastic 3 drawer container and it did hold many bags that were not too big







BUT

there were a few reasons why this was not a success

1.   There was a piece broken off at the bottom corner of one of the drawers and was quite rough so I had to remember not to grab the drawer at the corner.






2.   It was reasonably fine for holding bags which were not not large - I still need somewhere to put the really large bags I had.   (you know the bargains we buy when we see them)


3.   I do like to use gift bags as much as I can but the younger kids within the family tend to prefer paper wrapping on their presents so that they can tear it off as quickly and roughly as possible and the only way to keep paper in this set of drawers would be to have sheets folded up and although I do have sheets like this I do hate folds in the paper on presents.

    So Mostly I buy rolls of paper and they would just be too long to fit in the drawers so they were still in a green bag I had bought some years ago however each time I took out a roll even though I would put it back into the bag (eventually) I would often leave the bag down somewhere and then forget exactly where I had left it the next time I needed it.








4.   I also have tissue paper to use in the gift bags and it is always folded so it will in the drawers okay but when I hunt through a drawer for a suitable bag or paper or tissue I found that the tissue paper got rather messed about.





5.   Then I needed to keep gift tags somewhere plus sellotape and string and ribbon and bows and scissors.


6.    The main reason that I disliked my choice of the plastic drawers was not the actual drawers but the difficulty in moving the set of drawers as they were not on castors and the fact that castors could not be attached because of the style of the bottom of them and also that it was too low to do wrap anything on top of it.


So a sturdy wooden cart on castors with shelves 






and a rail







and a drawer

and has a top that could be used for wrapping

was looking great to me.







I am a great lover of baskets for storage and have in the past grabbed up some bargains when I have seen them so I knew I had baskets which could work with this cart.


I had 3 sets of these 3 baskets which were in 3 sizes.







I also had a lovely box which had come with Gin Sing as a gift from our in-laws in South Korea and it could be put to use with the cart too.







So how would I go about using the box & baskets?


Would I put a basket on each of the 3 shelves?







Would I put 2 baskets and the box on the shelves?







It would really depend on what was in the baskets and how they would fit into the shelves once they had the contents filling them.


So what I had would have to be sorted into types and sizes starting with the gift bags.


A lot of my gift bags were of the same size and I started to place them in the largest of my baskets






but there were many others as well






so they had to be grouped into 2 lots to be put in the other two smaller baskets.



Then the papers





and the tissue papers






Because of the more flimsy nature of the paper and especially the tissue paper I decided they should probably be all in the Box and I knew they would all fit well in there.





The box was able to sit on the top of the cart or it could go on the top shelf so a choice had to be made about that.

But before that I had that other paper to cope with - the rolls of paper but I knew exactly how I was going to store them and yes it was on the cart okay.

In fact those rolls were one of the reasons I was really drawn to using that cart because I knew they could sit upright resting on on of the shelves and held on by the side rail or handle.







So that after they were put on the cart I had to decide about the final placing of the box and the baskets.

Would it be box on top with baskets on the shelves




except that the top shelf would not hold the basket due to height so I had to take the gift bags out and lay them flat on the shelf.


Or

Would it be box on the top shelf with largest basket on the top and other two baskets on the bottom 2 shelves?






However 2 things were left to finish off

1.  How would the drawer be used?

2.  What about the really large bags I also had that never fit into anything?


Well

The drawer will hold all the gift tags, scissors, sellotape, pens etc. that we also need to have a fully working wrapping cart / station but at the moment I do need to go out and buy some more gift tags or make some as I only have about 2 left.

and as for the very large bags this picture of the finished project will explain about them










Now if anyone has any ideas what I could use the long ties (see pic below) that came around the sets of baskets for I would be grateful for your suggestions just let me know in the comments because I hate to not use something and hate to throw something out when it might be useful later.