Storage

So once your collection becomes what unenlightened roommates would call "a problem", therein lies the puzzle of storage.


What I've been doing is keeping everything in plastic shoe boxes acquired at the local Big Lots. They're a buck a piece, so not a bad deal. I'm up to three now. I've been trying to convince my boyfriend to look into a house so I can build a polish wall because let's face it, apartments kinda suck in the long run, but "blah blah I need extra capital" and "blah blah you get better rates if you've been employed by one place for more than three years", etc.

The plastic shoeboxes are a good solution, but not a great one. The issue is that you have to keep your polishes separated by color, but if you're obsessed with blue and green, you're going to have way more of those than any other color and it might be hard to fit them into one box. And yeah, there's nail polish racks on Amazon and whatnot, but I mean, the most those will hold is like... 90 polishes, and they're $35 a pop.

So what's a broke girl to do? Why, foamcore of course.

This is just the reds, pinks, whites, and clearcoats.

Foamcore, or foamboard, whatever you want to call it, is a really good, inexpensive solution. I wouldn't consider it a permanent one, by any means, simply because I'm really paranoid about it crumbling apart after too long of bearing the weight of all that glorious polish. But, it works fine in a pinch. It's called foamcore because, duh, it's got foam sandwiched between two layers of posterboard, making it lightweight but sturdy.

I used this tutorial to build mine, and she is way better at tutorials than I am so I recommend using it because I am really bad at tutorials and I'm not building a third one (yet). I did change some things; I used two 2" strips of foamcore to brace the shelves, gluing them together and running more glue along the edges to help sandwich them together, out of some misguided belief that it would help prevent droop? If you do need to build two or three, the piece of foamcore that makes your "sides" should have enough left over to provide two more sides, so you'd really only need to buy four more pieces of foamcore. I also strongly recommend you use a fresh razor blade in your box cutter, make multiple shallow cuts, and use a long metal ruler to keep your lines as neat as possible.

Black, grey, purple, blue, green, yellow...

More yellow, orange, red, pink, white, top coats. Yeah... I basically only had enough room after doubling them all up.

I don't know if I recommend hanging these on walls, though, unless you are REALLY confident. Mine are sitting on the floor for now, because I feel better about it and I'm kind of short anyway. I know a lot of girls do it, but there's something that scares me about what is basically a kindergarten craft weighed down with heavy glass bottles of poisonous fumes and staining agents on a wall above any surface.

Hopefully if my money fairy comes back from her vacation, I can buy some real life shelves (there are some wicked glass ones) and put my stuff up in a bit fancier of a display.