Mail Call

A few days ago, Josh and I got an unexpected nasty gram in the mail...it was from Cox Cable saying we were seriously delinquent in paying our bill (oops!). Josh swore up and down that he had paid the thing, but I politely pointed out to him that with the stacks of paper accumulated on our small desk there was no way to keep track of all our bills, coupons, catalogs, etc. We were officially in need of a mail sorter, so I took to the internet for a DIY option. This is what I found:

There were a couple problems with this option, though: 1. I wanted my sorter to be more narrow and vertical to fit on a small wall we have in our office. 2. I can't sew. So, I stored this image mentally and hit our local AC Moore to see what I could come up with. A few hours later, I had in front of me 3 12 inch MDF circles (approximately $2 each), 3 paint colors and brushes (already owned), a glue gun (already owned), some black and white fabric (already owned), and black sticker letters (approximately $3).

Here's what I decided to do. I painted each circle a different color for fun: green, blue, and yellow. After a few coats and some drying time, I laid each circle on the fabric to trace around one half of it and cut out an odd semicircle shape of fabric, like this:

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After that, I hot glued the fabric along the sides and bottom of the circle, careful to leave it a little loose to accomodate our future mail. Finally, I used my letter stickers to label each disc with its future holdings.

Here's a little snapshot of our finished product:

I haven't hung them on the wall yet because I want to paint the walls first, but sb far, it seems to be working to at least help us separate bills out from other less important papers that seem to collect on our desk.

So what about you all? Do you have a mail sorting solution to share? Or are you one of those fantastic people that just have everything set up for automatic pay?