My $10 Nail Polish Storage System!

I don't care if you've got 10 polishes or 10,000. The fact of the matter is: everyone needs a good storage system.  Otherwise, you'll forget what you have, and you'll be more inclined to buy new polishes thinking to yourself, "I don't think I have this color at home. Oh what the heck!" only to discover that yes, you DO have this color at home (or something very similar).  Unless you're a nail junkie, no one really needs 20 shades of candy-apple red nail polish.  So my point is, there are lots of advantages to having a good nail color storage system.

A simple plastic container or shoebox will do if your collection is small, but what if you've got years worth of polishes in your collection and, like me, you've got various boxes and crates scattered around the house causing complete chaos when you're looking for a specific shade?  Well, if you've got some extra cash on  your hands, you can get the much-coveted Helmer at Ikea.  The deep drawers of the Helmer allow you to store your polish upright (trust me, you do NOT want to store your polish bottles in any other position) and, to the casual observer, the Helmer allows your addiction to polish to go virtually unnoticed. Looks like just a regular piece of furniture, right?

I could have purchased the Helmer and been done with it.  But at $49.99, that wouldn't have been very Nouveau Cheap of me, right?  So for the past few weeks, I've been scouring Target, Michael's, and finally, dollar stores, to find just the right, and VERY INEXPENSIVE, way to store my polish.  It's been a challenge, but I finally found success at my local Dollar Tree.

Now, let me just get this out of the way: I'm obsessed with nail polish and I always have been (I'm talking since the late 70s when I was in elementary school).  So in case any of you think that I've only recently built up the following collection of polishes, this is actually the accumulation of many years of collecting (I only wish I had hung on to my original Wet n Wild polishes from the late 80s just for memory's sake but, sadly, they disappeared years ago).  The polishes below were all purchased over the last 15 or so years (anything older than that was lost a long time ago).  Yes, I've been on a little "polish bender" as of late, so I actually was horrified to learn that the amount of polishes I THOUGHT I owned (about 150) is actually much higher (300+).  

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, let me introduce you to my new storage system:

(click to magnify)

Each individual crate in this "system" was purchased at Dollar Tree for, of course, $1 each. I required 10 crates to store my entire 300+ polish collection (lucky guess since I bought 10 crates right off the bat and didn't need to go back to Dollar Tree mid-project to get more!).  

The most important thing to note about these square-shaped crates is that they're DEEP.  In my journey to find an inexpensive storage system, I've encountered so many containers that just aren't deep enough to enable you to store your polishes upright.  Many will store standard bottles, but I've got a lot of Japanese bottles that have VERY long brush handles (one in particular that's shaped like a guitar is well over 4 inches tall) so that's one reason why these crates ROCK.  Even my Japanese polishes can stand upright with a few inches to spare.

Another reason why I love these crates is because each one holds roughly 40 bottles of nail polish. So you can easily catagorize your polishes by color, and since you can see through all sides of each crate, you can visually scan though the crates and grab just the crate you want (if you've got a hankering to paint your toes purple, no problem. Just grab your purple crate and head to the couch!).

Let me also mention that these crates are STURDY. Even stacked 5-high, they do not wobble one bit. And they align themselves beautifully with no effort at all. Once you stack them up, they're not going anywhere.

And finally, I love how you can reconfigure these crates in any combination you want.  In the above collage, I stacked them in two different ways (4 in front/six in the back, and 2 stacks of 5, side by side), just to give you an idea of how you can totally customize these to suit your needs.  I also want to note that in the photos of "two stacks of five crates each" I deliberately left a small space in between the two stacks of 5 crates, just to show you that they're not connected. These crates stack together, with no spaces in between, quite easily.

So there you have it! My entire nail polish storage system, which can hold 400+ polishes, has a retail price of just $10 at Dollar Tree.  It may not be pretty, but I don't think it's an eyesore and the best part? IT WORKS!

PS: Each crate is less than a foot wide and a column of 5 crates stands roughly to my hip (I'm 5'5").

So tell me...how do you store your polish?