Organizing School Supplies in a Small Space

Brian and I's third year at OSU starts on the 24th of September (I can't believe we're starting our THIRD year, feels like just yesterday I was a freshman!). I felt that it was finally time that I organized all of the school supplies that we have piled up in our hall closet to help us prepare for the upcoming term, and year.

For today's post, I'm going to explain how I organized school (or college in my case) supplies in a small space such as a closet with built in shelves.

Here is what the finish closet looks like:

One of the first things that I did was to sort through the two boxes of writing utensils that Brian and I had piled up. Before we had our apartment, we both lived on campus where we each had our own room - so we had all of our own supplies in our own rooms. This was nice in the beginning but it became problematic because we would leave certain things in each other's room and then not be able to find it.

When we moved into our apartment, we put everything in the same boxes, and never sorted through it (since it didn't really matter at this point).

I organized the two boxes into 7 piles:

• Pens
• Pencils
• High-Lighters
• Sharpies
• Office Supplies
• Rare Office Supplies
• Miscellaneous 

I then went through each and every pen, high-lighter, and sharpie and threw out ones that were broken, or didn't work.

You'll notice that there are two drawers for pens - this is because we have a ton of pens. We've found a really cheap and effective way of getting good quality pens without paying a single penny. Career Fairs on Campus! Seriously - if you're campus offers any sort of career fair, GO TO IT! There is always employers giving away pens, pencils, note pads, high-lighters, sharpies, and pretty much anything you can imagine. We've even gotten chapstick, hand sanitizer, screen cleaners, keyboard cleaners, flash lights, and book lights. I don't even remember the last time that we bought a box of pens, because we get dozens at the career fairs. 

It's interesting that we have so many pencils - since neither of us actually WRITE with pencils in class. We both use pens to take notes. However, we do need pencils for midterms and finals when we have a scantron (fill in the bubble) exams. Luckily for me, I'm a history major (yay!!!!!) so the majority of my exams are written essays and questions, so I get to use pens.

Alright....Here's the cool part about some of the high-lighters: some are eraser-able. They use friction to get erased - which is really nice for high-lighting notes or in a textbook.

Ohhhhh sharpies...Where to start with the reasoning behind so many sharpies? Okay - so to be honest, we rarely use sharpies, unless we are doing a project that we need to add color to. Other then that, we don't use them very often - however, it's nice to have when studying because I can color-code my sections of notes.

In our "Office Supplies" drawer, it's a mix-match of supplies that we use often. This drawer includes: staplers (yes, plural...we have about 4 staplers in here, plus one big one that is on the shelf, and one by the mail station), erasers, staples, white out, glue sticks, sticky notes, 0.5 mm lead, 0.7 mm lead, and super glue.

I needed a place to put the really rare office supplies such as rulers, hole punchers, staple remover, and rubber bands. I took a shoe box and put them all inside, but made it accessible so that when we do need them, they are right in front.

Okay, the notebook situation. We have a bunch of notebooks and a few composition books (Brian seems to like composition books more then notebooks...I have no idea why). I placed all notebooks and composition books in order of height with the shortest being closest to the drawers. I held the writing books up with a book end to keep them in place and not falling down. It really seems to help! 

Both Brian and I use binders - I prefer 1/2" or 1" and Brian prefers 1-1/2" or 2". Since I didn't have enough room to fit all of the binders by themselves, I placed one inside of another. I placed similar sized binders within each other in order to create a perfect square (instead of is getting inverted) as well as to use the space better. You can see in the picture above how I did this. For example, there is a green binder in the front, but inside of it is a red binder of the same size.

Now, we can see exactly what we have and what we don't have in a simple way. Also, we are able to get the things that we need much easier. :)


What do you do to prepare for a new academic year? What has been your experience when moving in with your significant other and combining supplies? Let me know in the comments!