I Finally Made a Teacher Toolbox

This is my first Monday Made It post and I'm linking up with 4th Grade Frolics! I have seen so many awesome things other teachers have made and have gotten a TREMENDOUS amount of fantastic ideas from this linky. So here's my first!

This past weekend, I FINALLY made a teacher toolbox for myself! I have been eyeing them on Pinterest for ages now and a few of my friends just made their's and I just KNEW I had to make one for myself.

I had decided that I would make the labels myself since I couldn't find the exact thing I wanted on TpT to download and print. So, I ran down to Michael's and they were having a one day sale on scrapbooking paper!!! WOOO!! I snagged the patterns I wanted for 16 cents a piece instead of the regular 59 cents! I should have gone back and gotten more, but I didn't... :(

First my husband helped me out and spray painted the frame/base/thing black. The only color they had was navy blue!! And I thought I was being practical by wanting it in black... But oh well. The spray paint worked just fine. The hardest part about it was waiting for it to dry! I wanted it to be done so quickly!

Then I made some labels on my computer. This is a close up of the small labels which fit the 1"x2" drawer fronts. I made them using the label clipart from Ms. Fultz's Corner on TpT. 

I then started the tedious task of cutting them out. Initially when I printed the labels out and saw exactly how tiny they were, I was dreading this and thought that I would for sure resort to handwriting all my labels! But it wasn't bad at all! It took far less time that I thought it would and it was worth the short periods of hand cramps. ;)

As simple as it is, I just used a regular old glue stick! Well, this one is the jumbo glue stick, perfect for all my gluey sticky needs! I cut my scrapbook paper finds to fit the little drawers and glued the labels on. Easy peasy.

It was a beautiful site to see all these done! I made the large drawers (as you can see) in red and white polka dots to break up the black and to match the red stuff in my classroom. I am pretty sure I just stared at these for a good 10 minutes, completely in love.

I went the easy route and used scotch tape on the inside of the drawers. I was thinking that I would glue them and then mod podge the edges on the outside of the drawers so it wouldn't look so faded out, but I really didn't like the idea of the paper being on the outside. I really feel like it would tear over time, so I put them on the inside, which means all I did was use plain old tape! This also means that for next year I can just rip them out and make new ones with a different theme and not worry about the drawers looking wompy after the glue.

So there ya have it! I LOVE IT SO MUCH! If you have not made one of these bad boys yet, I recommend it. Everything is out of my desk and organized beautifully on a shelf at my fingertips!