Bin Loadin

Anyone who buys year-round for Operation Christmas Child boxes knows that you need to be strategic about storage.  And you've heard me moan about this plenty of times before.

This weekend my husband strongly encouraged me to complete one job to try to bring some order to the shoebox sprawl that has extended throughout the house lately.

So I decided to do a weekend marathon of stuffing all those plastic eggs I wrote about last week.

When I ran out of rings to put into the eggs I moved on to erasers.  These were a bit more challenging since they are almost too tall for some of the eggs.  It's amazing how much difference there can be in those, even when they come from the same package.

Unfortunately, a third or more of the eggs wouldn't close securely so they needed a smidgen of tape to keep them shut.  (yeah, my apologies in advance to the inspectors at the processing center.)

After two solid days of egg-stuffing, I finally finished at 9:00 tonight--with almost 8,000 total finished.  I ran out of erasers, though, so I have another 2,000 or so eggs to fill another time.  I did my best to finish one project--just didn't quite make it.

Tonight is the night for our weekly trash pick-up so we were able to bundle all this up for recycling.  It's great to finish a project like this on trash night.

Next, came the storage.  About those plastic storage bins...  I originally bought them to store candy canes and candy when we used to pack them in our boxes.   For the past few years it's been tough to know what to do with the bins.  I tried storing beanie babies in them, but when I stacked them the weight caused the lids on the ones on the bottom to break.

Last year I used them to store the ring-filled Easter eggs in my attic and I thought I'd do that again this year.  Except...I found someone who was willing to store completed jump ropes in his barn but they had to be in closed plastic containers because of rodent issues.  So there went all the bins with lids.

I decided to use the lidless bins for storing the eggs.  I covered them with paper to keep the eggs from falling out on the trip up the attic stairs.  By the way, let me tell you a bin full of plastic eggs gets really heavy when you put erasers in those eggs.

But we need to use every bit of storage space, even in the attic...

So we're bin loadin'.