Make It Yourself

Ever felt annoyed by the non-user-friendliness of things you've bought before? I sure have! My solution? Make it yourself. Obviously, this is not always an easy thing to do, nor always practicable in our busy lives, but sometimes I come across something that is really bugging me that I can actually change with a few simple adjusments that don't take too much time or money. Our address book is one. I got so frustrated with an address book that had teeny tiny lines for addresses...nowhere near enough when you've got friends overseas with 6 or 7 line addresses! Then there was the fact that it had nowhere for email addresses or mobile phone numbers. Yup, I've had this one for years. Then I found it kept getting out of date. I had crossed out and twinked over addresses so many times you'd think the book itself would be fatter from all that extra ink! After thinking over my frustrations for some time and concluding that I definitely don't want to spend money on an address book right now, I decided this was a project I can tackle myself. I bought a spiral folder that fits A5 paper. I titled it "Stylie Addressbook" scribbled on a bit of paper stuck on the front. I used my gillotine to cut some computer paper down from A4 to A5, and hole punched each page. Each person or family unit has a page (no doubling up on pages, or writing on the backs of pages, as I wanted to be able to throw a page out if it ever got too messy and start again without it affecting anyone else's details). I write in pencil, so that way it is really quick and easy to make any changes. Out comes the rubber (eraser) and pencil and it is all done and dusted in a few seconds. No waiting for ink to dry. No grimacing at all my crossing out.

I recently updated our address book, and added some colour coding and organisation (previously there was no rhyme or reason to where each person's details were kept). It now has blue for family and red for friends on the top right corner of each entry. Each entry follows a set order of Name, phone, email, address, birthday. Plus on the bottom right corner I'm writing when it was last updated. This because the last few times I've gone to send things to my brothers, I haven't been able to remember if the address is current or whether they've moved since.

So that's it. A simple solution to my dilema. It only cost a few dollars for the folder (which I could use again for something else if I ever want to) and is easy and cheap to maintain.

Have you recently done any 'make it yourself' projects instead of buying something ready made?

Amy

Friday, 22nd October, 2010