Gift Wrap Organization Ideas

I have a ton of gift wrapping supplies...and I like it that way. It means I don't really have to spend much time and money actually purchasing supplies and can instead, put together color coordinated, pretty packages. John has bugging me since pretty much November 18, 2012 to get my gift wrap out of his game room. It's been in long, shallow boxes but not all of them can fit together in a closet or under a bed.

I finally decided that the disorganized mess needed to be fixed! If you search Pinterest, there are a ton of extravagant, creative ways to store and organize gift wrap. While an entire gift wrapping wall or room sounds fantastic, I simply do not have the room or the time to put something like that together. So I went with a strategy focused on space available and simplicity of design.I ended up spending a bit more money on this project than I intended but I think the finished product is clean, simple and nice looking.

Here is the before storage. You can see everything's crammed into a bunch of boxes with no real rhyme or reason. And kept on the floor of my office and the game room.

Here is the space in the office closet that I chose for my storage station.

I purchased one skinny white laundry basket and two three-drawer storage carts from Walmart. $7 or $8 for the laundry basket and $20 each for the drawers. I wanted the skinny laundry basket for my rolls of wrapping paper. This way I didn't run into issues with some being too long to fit into the storage box and I can easily see the patterns I have. I've never seen a laundry basket this skinny but it was perfect for this project!

I would suggest categorizing your drawers ahead of time and then start sorting things based on those drawers. I knew I needed drawers for boxes, bags, tissue paper and then other miscellaneous items (tags, tape, scissors, etc). Another tip is to store the heavier items in the bottom drawers so the containers don't get top-heavy and fall over. I loaded the bottom drawer with boxes (both flat folded gift boxes and boxes of various sizes).

 As I organized, I realized I had way more bags than I thought so I sorted them into small, medium, large and extra large. The extra large bags did not fit into the drawers so I sandwiched them between the wrapping paper basket and the drawers.  Then I created one drawer for the large bags and a second for the small/medium bags.

Tall, skinny wine bottle bags on the right

Christmas bags on the right

Tissue paper was my biggest challenge. Again, I had way more of it than I'd thought. Don't tell anyone I said this, but I think I'm a bit of a packrat. I started by laying out the tissue paper by color and threw away the pieces that were ripped or balled up to the point of no return. It actually felt good to purge some of this stuff! Then I folded each color into a square and stacked into the next drawer. Solid colors on the left and patterned papers on the right.

Lexi decided to help organize the tissue paper all over the house

The top drawer consists of lots of ribbons and bows so that I can easily select one that goes along with the color and style of the package I create.

Here's the finished product! And of course one with Lexi posing. Can't wait to wrap my next gift!