Nail Swatch Stick Display Board

Good lovely morning my fellow readers!  I hope everyone enjoyed their weekend!  I did, though it was a busy and expensive one!

On Thursday night, I dropped my laptop on the floor off of my bed, and it fell screen first :(  There were lines and spots all in the display, so I decided to get myself a new laptop.  I kept wanting to clean the screen, but it wasn't going away, and it was getting worse the more I tried to use it.  I'm loving my new one, but Windows 8 is going to take a little getting-used-to :)

I finished up my Nail Swatch Stick Display Board last night and my dad hung it on my wall for me :D  OMG I'm in LOVE!!!

Isn't it beautiful (on the outside)?!  Just wait, I will show you the inside in a minute.  Let's look at how I got to this point!  If you have been following me on Facebook, you have probably already seen these pictures, but that's OK :D

First I started with painting my swatch sticks... *_* isn't it so pretty!?  I have added some since this picture was taken.  I do my swatch sticks now as soon as I get a polish.

Then my dad made me this board:

The idea was to have it look like a dartboard case, and when it is opened up, you can see all of the nail sticks hanging inside.  My dad did all the woodworking, we worked on figuring out all the dimensions together though :)

Then I hammered in the nails to hang the sticks on.  488 of them...

This is how the sticks will hang

Then I spray painted 1 coat of primer and 2 coats of flat white spray paint on the back and front of all 3 pieces.  I did this after I put the nails in so that everything would be white :)

Then, finally, last night I applied vinyl decals I got from WalMart onto the outside of the doors, put it all together, and got dad to hang it for me!

Are you ready for this?!  Here is the inside!  Click the picture for a closer look.

On the left panel is all my Indie polishes.  On the right panel is all Julep polishes.  In the middle is everything else!  The bottom right corner of the middle panel are my Gel II gel polishes.  As they are shown here, they are sorted alphabetically by brand, and then within the brand the colour names are sorted alphabetically as well.  I am going to try to recruit my sister, who has the same OCD as me, to help me organize these by rainbow colour.  When we get it all done, I will edit this post for you guys to see :D

What do you think?!  Do you love it as much as I do???

In other news, I also went to Michael's yesterday and got some melmers to store my polishes in.  They are pricier than I was expecting, so I didn't get as many as I was hoping to get, and spent more on them than I expected to.  Oh well, I love the way it looks, though now I'm going to have to to a LOT of dinking around with my polishes because I am so used to them being on display and not having to worry about not being able to see what colour it is.. *sigh*  Oh well, labour of love, right?!

My polishes are in the drawers on the left and the miscellaneous stuff from my desk that had to be taken out of my room is all in the drawers on the right.  There are a couple things with these melmer/cubes that I'm not overly struck on.

First, the cost of them is pretty high for the quality - $50 each.  I was lucky and they were having a 40% off sale on craft storage, so I did save some money on them.  Don't get me wrong, they are sturdy because they are made out of particle board.  However, some of the predrilled holes didn't line up perfectly and some of the grooves you put the thin boards into for the back of the box and bottoms of the drawers didn't line up 100%.  And I did have a piece that split pretty bad, but dad's going to remake me a new piece.  It's inside the drawer so it's only visible when it's open - hence the missing drawer front.  If my dad wasn't helping me with these, I would have got so frustrated with them and probably would have given up making them.

Secondly, they are different whites.  This probably wouldn't bother a "normal" person, but with my OCD having to do with colour and matchy-matchy-ness, this bugs me.  They are the same product, essentially, from the same company, you would think that they would use the same material/paint for everything.  If I was doing a big storage unit like they show on the boxes, I would have been peeved!  Also, the handles are different.  I realize that they are 2 different styles, but, again, they are from the same company.  You would think that inventory would be easier if they used the same handles.  Also, I have been finding that the little screw plugs on the 2-drawer cube don't stay in place; they pop off any time you touch them or put something on them.

I know, I'm probably just nit-picking at this point, but these are little things that are going to bug me, especially with the cost of them.  More so the colour and the plugs falling out than the handles.  But I'm sure with time I will get over it and just enjoy my melmers :D

What do you guys use for polish storage?