Mail Sorter Recover

We had a serious problem with mail. It was so bad that I refuse to post a picture to show you.  A few times, things got misplaced because we didn't have a clearly designated mail area, or we just didn't have any organization to the grand scheme.

I made an executive decision and informed the hubby that I would be purchasing a mail organizer.

I scoured the internets for days.  The traditional ones through amazon.com, or Office Depot, etc. were just much more than I wanted to shell out for something to hold our mail.  It's not like we are running some kind of executive office out of our home!

Pinterest provided several DIY projects but none of them spoke to me.

That's when I hit up the thrift stores and stumbled upon this gorgeous gal:

Beautiful in all her paisley pink glory.

As much as I like the lady-like pink paisley appeal, it didn't really go with our kitchen, which is light gray and white with a splash or two of black and blue (don't worry...it works).  Enter some extra fabric I have laying around:

No, this isn't taken in grayscale.

I just so happen to have these from when I covered our cork board to make it prettified (that's a word...sort of).  So here's what I did in pictures:

I used a glue stick.  I have about ten on hand at all times.

More glue stick.  Say hi to my compy!

Glue glue glue...pull, stretch, flatten fabric.

YAY!  Outside done!

Cover the first inset...

ALL DONE!

I realize some of you may have been expecting a walk through tutorial on this.  No can do.

Why?

Because to be honest, it was just a lot of glue stick, carefully stretching and flattening the fabric against the surface.  I have no genius way for how I covered corners or magically fit things over the insets.  I just snipped a little corner here, a little more there, and prayed.  If that didn't work, I'd recut.  Thankfully, I had enough scraps of these fabrics to cover.

Now that we've had her up for a few weeks, what do we think?  Love her!  She is the perfect size, is durable, and she has definitely cleaned up our mail area tremendously.  She even has her own little shelf in our kitchen.

Oh...what was the cost?

OK I could say the fabric was $0 but I did buy it at some point.  The fabric all together cost me about $3 because I bought the fat quarters on sale at Joann's (LOVE ME SOME JOANN'S).

The mail sorter?  $3 at a thrift store because she was 50% off.

Six bucks for a pretty and efficient mail sorter?  Sounds good to me!