I've been on a bit of an organizing kick lately, preparing the house for some bigger projects we're hoping to get done over the next few months. One thing that I knew needed to be addressed was all the keys we have for the house. A few weeks ago I lost my front door keys (actually left them at my mom's house when I went to visit) and, since we don't have spares, had to use one of the side entrances to get in and out of the house. Of course, finding the key for the side entrance was an ordeal. That got me thinking about setting up a pretty system to have all the keys in one place, in case we ever need them. We have a lot of doors in the house that we don't frequently use and those keys tend to be scattered all over the place. A quick google search gave me the idea of a shadowbox key organizer - I set out for Michael's for supplies and got to work.
I purchased a shadowbox (7.50 after a 25% off coupon), little wooden plaques ($0.20 each) and some pretty paper (on clearance for $0.29). I already had some green acrylic paint, spray adhesive and corkboard on hand.
I used to back of the shadowbox as a template to size my corkboard square (these can also be bought at Michaels - a pack of four is around $5 and, if you clip the coupon in their Sunday circulars, you can typically get either 40% or 50% off).
Since I did it right on the couch (yes this is how I do things, and then I wonder how I manage to break my couch), I just used a box cutter to lightly score the corkboard, and then snapped the piece right off.
I then used the cut corkboard as a template to cut the decorative paper to size (don't mind the dried glue strips on the corkboard - I had originally glued fabric onto it for another project I did, but didn't end up liking it. Thankfully I didn't throw it out and was able to use it for this project)!
I used spray adhesive to attach the paper to the corkboard to the shadowbox back. Here's how it looks from the side:
Once I put the shadowbox back together, I quickly painted the wooden plaques, which dried in less than 30 minutes. A bead of hot glue allowed me to attach the plaques to the paper. I probably should have measured it to make sure they were evenly spaced, but I just used the squiggly lines on the paper as a guide.
I used a regular pen to label the wooden plaques, so I know which key was for what. I had also originally planned to use cuphooks to hang the keys from, but it was too much work to screw them into the flimsy box back, and since I had already put corkboard in there, I just went with push pins! Finding 6 matching pushpins in the house was a problem though, and I know they look slightly utilitarian, so I am on the hunt for prettier pushpins to replace them with. Does anyone know if they make cup hook push pins?
Finally, I located all (but one set) of our keys, and hung them in the box. Some of the keys are corroded because they go to the gates of our fence and have been hanging off the gates since we got the fence put in 2 years ago! At some point, I'll try to clean them up or cover them with those rubber key cover things (maybe)!
And here it is hung up on one of our kitchen walls, near the garage and side entrance and adorned by a mask a colleague brought me from Indonesia.
I love it so much more than the basic key organizers you find at big box stores, and all for less than $10! What do you think?
