What About my Stapler?

We're still pottering around getting my home office finished, but once I actually started working from home there was one thing I absolutely needed. A place for pens and staplers and scissors!

My dining table turned desk doesn't have any drawers, so I had to come up with another solution. I very quickly decided that I wanted my office supplies to live on the wall to the right of my desk. Since I'm right-handed and I don't have much surface space on my desk, that gets them off my desk but still within reach. Here's a shot of that wall from when the desk first went in.

As always, I turned to the Internet for inspiration, and found a couple of interesting options...

I could put up a metal sheet and attach magnets to containers for storage, like in this bathroom cabinet...

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I could paint and reuse food cans for storage, and probably just screw them to the wall...

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But then I saw this.

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And I couldn't believe how simple it was! It's a framed pegboard used as a wardrobe organiser! But with fabric over it, covering the pegboard! So it had the same functionality as this kind of office arrangement...

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But without having any of the trademark pegboard holes visible! Brilliant! So I decided to do exactly the same thing. I trotted off to Bunnings and bought some pegboard.

Tom then cut it to size for me so it would slot into the wall nicely between the two existing horizontal beams.

And then I gathered together my supplies. I never throw away any of the empty jars that we accumulate in the kitchen, so I had a nice supply of various sizes stored away. I bought some zip ties (cable ties) and a few peg board hook thingies, and I was ready to start playing around.

I worked out that plier holders were the perfect option for holding scissors, and that a particular hook would be great for holding the stapler.

And then I just kept mucking around with the arrangement.

When I was satisfied that it was going to work, I pulled out some fabric that I had purchased a couple of yards of when I ordered my curtain fabric...

And laid the pegboard upside down on top of it.

Then I just cut around the pegboard, leaving a fairly generous sized gap that I could then fold over.

I decided to simply tape the fabric to the back of the pegboard rather than fixing it more securely, mainly because I'm lazy, and the back won't be visible to anyone.

When I turned it over, this is what I had! The zig-zag-ey lines aren't perfectly straight, which is a problem, but I decided to work with it, hoping that it wouldn't be very noticeable once the board was filled with office supplies.

And then I gritted my teeth while I poked the first couple of holes in my fabric.

And then the first hook went in!

Next up, it was time to start securing my jars to the board. I'd decided that zip (cable) ties would do the job well, so I poked a few more holes, and pulled the zip tie through them in a loop.

The tie slotted nicely just under the rim of the jar.

And then I just pulled the zip tie tight (but not too tight, so the jar still sat flat against the board) at the back.

And so the process continued! I even managed to secure my sticky tape dispenser to the board with two zip ties.

Once I was happy with the arrangement, and satisfied that I probably couldn't fit much more on the board, I removed everything that might be in danger of falling off...

And we moved to the office to fix it to the wall. This is the sight that greeted us. Allie has decided that the floor under my desk is her new favourite sleeping spot. Please excuse the mess.

We just slotted the board into the wall space first, to check that it fitted ok with its extra layer of fabric, which it still did. Hooray!

And then we taped some little strips of timber (leftover from our office ceiling cover up project) to the back of the board, so that it wouldn't sit directly against the wall - which would have been difficult anyway since the nubby ends of the zip ties would have pushed it out a bit.

And then we simply screwed through the front of the board in the places where we knew the scrap timber sat behind, to secure the whole board to the wall.

We tried to position the screws in places where they would be covered up by jars.

Because the board fit quite snuggly into its space in the wall, we only needed to use about six screws to attach it, so that it could take the weight of all of the jars (and their contents) without falling down.

So it was up! Looking a little strange without its contents!

Which I was then happy to slot in.

I had discovered quite early on that although the cable ties held the tops of each jar fairly well, because there was a gap between the jars' rim and the board itself, the jars could fairly easily wiggle out of the cable ties' grip. This is a good thing for being able to mix and match the positioning of each jar if I want to, but not such a good thing since these are jars suspended off a wall, meaning they could come crashing down in pieces if they're not held in place properly.

So I solved that problem by slotting in a pegboard hook underneath each jar, to give it enough support from below that it couldn't just slip out of the cable tie and crash to the ground, but still allowing plenty of wiggle room if I ever want to switch things around.

So without further ado, let me introduce my new office supply pegboard!

It's not the most attractive thing I've ever made, but it's definitely practical, and it adds a nice pop of cheerful orange colour to that little corner of my office. And ties in nicely with my corkboard calendar as well! Plus, it was not very expensive. I had all of the jars already, so my only expenses were the pegboard itself (which I've still got offcuts from that I can use somewhere else), the fabric, the cable ties (I got the longest type I could find) and the pegboard hooks. I can confidently say that  the total cost came in at less than $40, all-in-all!

Oh and if you've got keen eyes, you can see that my little crystal glass of gold drawing pins on my desk (seen here) has now been joined by two taller glasses that now contain paper clips! Oh, and a fancy black and gold jug thingie from Dubai (I'm the Queen of officialy terminology, here).

Never say I don't give my office supplies top notch treatment!

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