May 14, 2010

Make a Paint Chip/Fabric Swatch Idea Folder

Today’s post is a great way to wrap up Decorating Week. I love home decorating and re-decorating and have finally realized that it’s a process and not something that happens overnight. For me, it’s more fun to hunt down good deals and the perfect piece for a room rather than buying everything at once so that the room is decorated. Let me give you a real-life example:  We have been in our home for over a year and we still don’t have a dining room set. Right now there’s a kid play kitchen and a hockey net in the dining room. And, I’m okay with it. We’re looking for a bargain and the perfect set for the room. If it takes 3 years to save up the money and find the set, so be it. My kids get to have a big run-around room for now and it’s worth it to find the right pieces. I also haven’t painted the entire house because we’re still deciding on paint colors and window treatments, etc. To keep all my ideas together, I started putting putting all of my collected swatches in a little mini photo album so I could toss my ideas into my purse and go looking for goods. I wrote a blog post about it a few months ago here.
Today, I’m going to show you how I’ve “decorated” my Paint and Fabric Swatch Folder.
For supplies, I used a 4×6 photo album (cheap), a paper cutter, white card stock, two-sided tape, and my label maker. 
I cut the paper into 4×6 pieces and printed out labels for every room (printed vertically).
I trimmed the holes from my paint chip collection (but made sure that the color name and number remained).
Then I started to assemble each “room” on a separate 4×6 sheet.
Then I put the pages in the little  book in the order of the rooms in the house – front door, living room, dining room, kitchen, family room, etc.
Here’s what they look like in the “book”. The front cover is a photograph of the front of our house and the back cover is looking out the back window.
I’m linking this post up to some parties – check them out!

Posted Under:

homekeeping, Make It, solutions