MISSON: IMPOSSIBLE ORGANIZATION

I am trying to clean up my house!!! The old saying goes, "it will get worse before it gets better," right? Well based on the current status, my house will look FABULOUS when I'm done.
While going through a box in the basement in an effort to throw away things, I certainly found several things that were not only thrown away, but moved (needlessly) upstairs to join the clutter that I'm supposed to be weeding out. But bear with me, this story has a happy ending. I found this:



It's just a small, wooden tray. Smaller than a piece of printer paper. I'm not sure where it came from. I decided to enlist it in the fight against clutter. One for me, and one for Dave. I could transform them into catchalls for our keys, sunglasses, phones, etc. So here is how it happened:

I bought paper (can you guess which one is mine?)...



I painted my tray black. Dave's will be a cream color if I get around to it.



(stay tuned for quite a few projects completed with the help of this brave polar explorer fabulous can of shiny black paint)



Then I pasted the paper down with Mod Podge. I brushed one coat over the entire tray to seal the paint. Then I added about 3 more coats onto the paper to help it withstand key scratches and inevitable cell phone/wallet/sunglasses/burts bees bonks.



TADAA!!!


Now the challenge becomes keeping the counter clean enough that I can find the tray to store my stuff in.