Old Photos & Memories 10 Ideas - Organising My Home

Where do you store your old photos?

Do you have a Memory Box?

Today I'm writing about something that is important to me and probably to everyone. 

Old photos and other items can bring back happy memories and can be something we treasure for a long number of years.

PHOTOS

Many years ago I started scanning negatives of old photos and when I don't have the negative of the photo I can scan the actual photo itself.


For this job 3 items are important:

1.  Negative Scanner to scan the negatives 

2.  Computer to scan photos when I don't have the negatives

I'm also planning to use this to scan my wedding photos from 47 years ago

3.  External Hard disc drive to store the digital photos.

I will store them on my computer but I also want to have them in a second location in case anything happens to my computer because I don't want to lose these photos.

A third location will be in the cloud.

But we must not forget that the original photos should be taken care of as well

So we still need all our photo albums and boxes to store and organise those.

But what about other Memories?

1.   If you have audio memories then you'll have them on CDs (cassettes are now getting to be obsolete) or DVDs or Videos which many of us now store on YouTube

That is another thing for my ToDo List  -  Transfer our recordings from cassette & CD to MP3s

Fred & I have also made many sing-a-long videos of Kids Songs (some I have written and others we have know for years) for our grandkids as memories of us and of their childhood growing up with us always singing and then of course we have been able to use them for Sunday School work.  

These are stored on Fred's YouTube Channel

https://www.youtube.com/@apostolicworshipuk

Playlist

Kid's Songs & Choruses

 

2.  You may have large special pictures framed so they need to go on the wall

Like the picture of the last home we had in Londonderry - a house we designed ourselves - with the 3 kids out washing the car.

 3.  You may have stickers on a suitcase - reminders of good holidays and places you have travelled to.

4.  You may have certificates of achievements, or other things on sheets of paper

They will need to be filed away to be kept safely.

 5.  You may have large hard to store items like my Nephew Lee who carried the torch in his hometown for the London Olympics.  I wrote more about that in  Olympic Torch Run

                                 

Or my husbands Didgeridoo which he brought back from our Anniversary trip to Australia.

(You can see it propped up against the roll-top desk in the picture above.)

 For this type of item you need a large glass cabinet or some type of stand because you don't want it to be hidden away, you want it to be on display and kept safely.  We have not done as we would advise with this object.





6.  What about the smaller objects that bring back happy memories - small sporting trophies, small souvenirs from trips abroad or perhaps like me you have a few things that belonged to grandparents or parents who are no longer with us.

These types of things decorate my Study shelves and the grandkids often ask questions about them.

7.  If you have old letters you want to keep then you will need a box or some type of storage where the pages will be kept flat and not get crumpled.

I use my stationery box for my old letters because of its vertical sections.

8.  You may also be like me and like to keep cards your family have given you over the years and this is a box I got because it had butterflies on it and I Love Butterflies but also because it has separators inside (was meant for recipe cards I think) and it is ideal for cards.

 9.  You may have smaller objects like tickets or postcards or newspaper clippings etc. that you need to keep in a Memory Box.

I have three Memory boxes in use and full already

my wooden Ark decorated one -  I wrote about my love of all things Ark in I Love Arks

my wooden one with the kind of tapestry inserts,

and my wooden case type box with its metal handle.

10.  Some of those things that cause our sweet memories could go in scrapbooks and I have already done this for one topic and do intend to make more scrapbooks of specific times (both in actual solid scrapbooks and digitally) but that will take up more time later.

BUT

WHAT ABOUT THOSE MEMORIES FOR WHICH WE HAVE NO PHYSICAL OBJECT TO KEEP?

We can keep a notebook as a journal of the things we do as often as we wish, or the things our children are doing, or now the grandkids.

For example I wish I had thought to write down somewhere the date of the day I became a Christian because I was young then and don't remember exactly what age I was.  

Nowadays I would write important things like that in my journal and then always be able to look back in that collection of books to refresh my memory as I did for our years in America and our years in Belgium and now have recently started again.

Some day I will have all my memories completely neatly sorted into all these places.

Where do you keep your memories?

Refillable Easter Eggs - Organising My Home

Last year I discovered a girl called Louise who made refillable Personalized Easter Eggs and I bought some for my 3 grandchildren.

This year I will be re-using these three eggs.

Now when I got these large plastic eggs they were already full of treats and you can read more about the eggs & about Louise's online business in my review  

Louloumadethis - Unique Gift Ideas

 

This year when I went up to the storage area 

I easily found the eggs.

2 Deep Pink ones for Ruby and Sarah 

and a Blue one for Matthew 

but of course they were not full of little treats now.

I would have to think about it this year and decide what I should put in the eggs and then organise to get the treats myself.

BEFORE

Main Thing is I need to remember 

an egg is "egg-shaped" 

so not just any treat will fit inside.

IDEAS

First Thing as per usual for me is a list of ideas that would immediately spring to mind knowing what our grandkids like.

1. Chocolate
2. Stickers
3. Lego Cards
4. Little Notebooks
5. Washi Tape
6. Balloons
7. Bubbles

Secondly I thought about having a little look around my study for the box that contains things that I used to have for little prizes for my Sunday School kids a few years back.

1. Sharpeners
2. Bookmarks
3. Magnets
4. Hair clips
5. Pencils
6. Pens
7. Flip Bracelets
8. Small puzzles

So glad I thought about this because I then realised that I probably already had enough little treats in the house to fill all three eggs. 

I got out my two boxes that had these types of things plus other larger things stored inside.

The first one mostly had items that would be too large 

The second one had a variety of better sized items

 

FILLING  THE  EGGS

These were the things I could consider (except for the large bubble wands but they will be used in the back garden in the summer because the grandkids love to run around the grass after me trying to catch or burst the bubbles).

Small bubbles - but there was only one of these left and they would not be happy if one got bubbles and the other two didn't.

Washi Tape - only two was ok because it would be for the girls but at 2 yrs and 4 yrs they are a bit young to appreciate it.

Balloons - Yes definitely they always enjoy a balloon to play with.

Small ball puzzles - best for Matthew's age so he could get one of those.

Stickers - only a few Easter themed ones and they would suit Sarah

Little Hoop button operated game - Ruby would be old enough now to try it.

And we cannot forget the 

Chocolate treats - Ruby needs different items from Matthew and Sarah as she is allergic to nuts and dairy so I had to go online previously and order a selection of bars and buttons for her because there is not a good variety in our supermarkets.

AFTER

Yes everything I had picked did fit into the eggs but I could have had more treats if eggs were not egg-shaped and I didn't include any chocolate items.

 

     

Tips & Helps!

Don't leave things like this to the last minute.

Most mums and grannies will normally have some sweet treats in the house but you can also have some other little treats bought in anytime you see something in one of those pound shops or the dollar shops for our American friends.

Also what about some of those small things that your kids receive at Christmas or birthdays that they hardly notice among everything else or just forget about. Store them away in a box for a time like this.

Another place I like to gather things up from is any Christian Book Shop I'm in - some of these have a great variety.

Lastly when you are shopping online somewhere like Ebay keep an eye out for small items because sometimes you can buy a bunch of similar things for a good price.

So is Easter sorted for our Grandkids?

 

Almost for the grandkids because I have the refillable eggs and I already have some eggs for an egg hunt for them.  Now just need to get some Easter eggs for grandkids, the grown-up kids & my husband and myself because let's be honest we all love Chocolate Easter Eggs too.

Now you may be thinking how this is organising my home!  

Well....

1.  I had the eggs already in the house

2.  I knew exactly where they were in the storage area

3.  I had little gifts that would suit the kids ages in 2 boxes

4.  I knew exactly where these two boxes were in my study

5.  I had a table clear for working on where I could sort the little gifts out around the eggs without having to use my dining table.

How to Organize Craft Punches

Over the years I have collected a lot of Craft materials 

but not used all that I gathered together into my Craft Armoire.

One of the reasons for this was that I had not organised my supplies in the best way to make sure I would regularly use them.

I had found many storage items large and small for storing my crafts but now I was determined to get more organised.

Today I'm going to tell you about how I organised my 

PUNCHES

BEFORE

Originally I had my punches in square matching cardboard boxes of 

3 different sizes 

grouping 

the larger border type punches together in the largest box on the right

 

and 

the small & medium sized ones together in the small box on the left.

Then a mix of small & medium sized ones 

together with the large ones that were leftover from the large box 

in the medium box below

Yes you can clearly see it was not a good arrangement for storage

1. Sizes were mixed together
2. Types were mixed together
3. Subjects were mixed together
4. Boxes had to be opened to even try to remember what punches I had
5. Punches on top of punches meant ones had to be lifted out to see the others.

I also tried using clear plastic boxes to store them thinking I could maybe have the same types or same subjects together and see through the sides.

This was the result:

I only got two boxes used when I realised I was going to need 4 of them if I wanted to keep them well sorted and 4 of these boxes would take up much more space.

If I didn't want to use 4 then it would always mean that some punches were on top of others and I would forget what I had and every time I was thinking of using a punch I would still need to go through all the punches which meant I would still be moving and opening boxes and to be honest I'm too lazy for that.

So I was back where I had started!!! 

Then I saw an interesting item one day online in Ikea's Kvissle Series

It's called the Letter Tray

With this item 

1. I would not have to lift one box off another and open boxes and then sift through punches lying on top of each other
2. I would be able to see all the punches in one section without even touching any of them.

So I got all my punches out again 

and started sorting them into subjects & types like borders,  designs, 

ANIMALS

PLANTS

So off to Ikea and I bought the Kvissle Letter Tray

I knew beforehand that I would have a choice of places to keep the tray unit as it could fit unto a couple of different shelves in my Craft Armoire (Ikea give you all the dimensions) 

and I knew it would be so much better than my previous system for my punches and I was right.

Corner & small border punches

Animals & Plants

Shapes

Large Borders

AFTER

It is now

       easy to open, 

 

              easy to see the punches,  

                     easy to lift them out 

and then maybe the most important fact of all 

it is

 

       so easy to return the punch to it's position - yes!

 

I will  NOW put each punch away as soon as I use it 

because 

it is just a matter of pulling out the right tray and placing it where it came from.

Doesn't it look so neat here in my Craft Armoire

even now when I got a few extra punches and put them in the wicker basket in front but that is easy to lift out and then I can pull out the trays.

NOTE to SELF

Please try not to be tempted to buy more punches