Last year I decided to turn our spare room into my office/dressing room/guest room in an attempt to be more organised. As I had already claimed the spare room's adjoining en-suite bathroom and the built in robes as my own, I figured I may as well finally update some of the furniture and add some storage space for both my home office and my makeup collection.

This pretty much led to a week long IKEA-hacks-Google-hole resulting in the following setup LOL.

My main makeup storage unit is in the famous and beauty blogger's best friend, the ALEX 9 drawer tower from IKEA. Prior to this I had just a simple 10 plastic drawer trolley from Officeworks which did the job for awhile, but over time my stash outgrew it, plus it couldn't handle the weight of my hair tools.

ALEX 9 drawer makeup/hair styling storage

The ALEX is as nice as it looks, its heavy, sturdy feeling and easy to clean. I love the mix of shallow and deep drawers and the overall clean lines and simple cut out handles. The assembly wasn't too bad - I pride myself on being somewhat of an IKEA furniture assembly goddess aka Queen of the Allen Key, but towards the end I did need my lovely fiance's help/man strength to finish putting together all the drawers.











On top of my ALEX tower I have a mini plastic 5 drawer organizer that I picked up from some cheapie Red Dot kind of store just for my eye products, this has like my eye pencils, indie pigment sample jars and other bits and bobs like eye lash glue, eye primer etc. The other three are just glass jars I've had forever that I use to store my brushes and mascaras in.



My other storage space is another IKEA regular, the 4x2 EXPEDIT bookcase which I hacked into a desk with drawer and cupboard inserts on either side. The left hand side of this setup has my second monitor, laptop, wacom tablet and pixar lookalike lamp with camera/computer gear in the drawers while the right hand side has my mirror and makeup/stationary in the drawers.

my office/dresser combo when I first set it up - LOL it's never this super tidy!

my cool fake-wrought-iron-looking mirror from IKEA and that inner white strip in the LEDs and the controller is at the base

desktop goodies - powders, my beloved MAC Fix+ and other spritz/sprays, perfumes and hair leave in treatment

Top drawer of the right hand side of my desk, underneath the mirror - this is where I keep my day to day stuff, regular palettes and my makeup bag when its not in my handbag

For some reason I though it would be awesome to have LED lights on the inner edge of the mirror for extra lighting - fun idea in concept however the execution wasn't that great. The lights look cool and change colour, however just aren't bright enough to give awesome all over illumination.

And lastly a single EXPEDIT cube all by itself with a glass shelf and door insert for all my nail polishes - also doubles as a bedside table :)

all teh colours!! normally they would be in colour groups but I had raided it earlier that day for polishes

In all honesty I love the way it all looks and the storage space is great, but realistically I still apply my makeup in my bathroom, so the majority of the time my daily products are scattered all over my sink/vanity LOL. But I try to keep it in order!!

So how do you guys organize your beauty products?