Make a Paint Chip/Fabric Swatch Idea Folder

Today's post is a great way to wrap up Decorating Week.  I love home decorating and re-decorating and have finally realized that it's a process and not something that happens overnight.  For me, it's more fun to hunt down good deals and the perfect piece for a room rather than buying everything at once so that the room is decorated.  Let me give you a real-life example:  We have been in our home for over a year and we still don't have a dining room set.  Right now there's a kid play kitchen and a hockey net in the dining room.  And, I'm okay with it.  We're looking for a bargain and the perfect set for the room.  If it takes 3 years to save up the money and find the set, so be it.  My kids get to have a big run-around room for now and it's worth it to find the right pieces.  I also haven't painted the entire house because we're still deciding on paint colors and window treatments, etc.  To keep all my ideas together, I started putting putting all of my collected swatches in a little mini photo album so I could toss my ideas into my purse and go looking for goods.  I wrote a blog post about it a few months ago here.  

Today, I'm going to show you how I've "decorated" my Paint and Fabric Swatch Folder.

For supplies, I used a 4x6 photo album (cheap), a paper cutter, white card stock, two-sided tape, and my label maker. 

I cut the paper into 4x6 pieces and printed out labels for every room (printed vertically).

I trimmed the holes from my paint chip collection (but made sure that the color name and number remained).

Then I started to assemble each "room" on a separate 4x6 sheet.

Then I put the pages in the little  book in the order of the rooms in the house - front door, living room, dining room, kitchen, family room, etc.

Here's what they look like in the "book".  The front cover is a photograph of the front of our house and the back cover is looking out the back window.

I'm linking this post up to some parties - check them out!