a little facelift.

In my opinion, one of the primary requisites of having a space that is organized in a lovely manner is having matching bins, containers, or tubs. Varied bin shapes, sizes, and colors can make your space look even more cluttered than when you started organizing. The clear choice to avoid this problem is to buy several bins (even a couple of extras)at once of the same shape, size, and color. But my beef with that solution is: where am I going to store all of my “extra” bins until I use them? Further, what if I still run out of bins? I feel like every time I go to the store, the bins look different. They might be the same, clear tubs, but they always have different colored handles or lids.

I tell you my philosophy because, of course, when I went to Target this weekend to buy two new bins for some upcoming projects, my trusty blue-handled, clear bins were nowhere to be found! The sales associate acted like I was a mad person for asking if they had any, and proceeded to tell me the only tubs they had were purple. Fantastic.


Ten minutes and a brief jaunt around the store to confirm that the sales associate wasn’t pulling my leg later, I found myself once again staring at those fabulous clear tubs with the newly “improved” purple handle. After about 4 minutes of endless staring, I finally decided that I could probably paint the handles to match my other tub’s blue handles, right?! The handles had a slightly rough texture which told me the paint would probably stick with no problem. What an easy fix!

So I pulled out my old bin and set it with my new bins, ready to start mixing up some paint!

But as I started comparing which paint colors I had with the blue handle to start matching up, I thought I would probably end up spending all day just getting the paint to match. That’s when I threw the hat in and thought I would just paint all three tubs’ handles a new, fabulous color!
So I taped off all of my boxes with blue painter’s tape.

And 2 coats of acrylic paint and 1 coat of sealer later, we have lovely matching tubs again just waiting to be filled and labeled!

While I love the results of this project, I love even MORE what it implies. This means, that when the ugly-colored handle tubs (i.e. eggplant purple) go on sale, which they ALWAYS do, I can just grab up those at a lower cost and paint the handles to match what I have! Saving money AND matching bins?! Halle-to the-lujah.

• This was a simple solution to my trusty tub color being discontinued.
  
• I used supplies I already owned, making this little project cost-free!
  
• With just a couple of coats of paint, we can insure that we always have tubs that match making our hard organizational work look smashing!