Phone shelf update with vintage jar organizer

We keep our phone, pens, sticky notes and other odds and sods on one of the shelves on our ladder shelf in our eating area off of the kitchen. It was a boring little shelf with our pens et all being held in a tired-looking black desk organizer that I'm sure came from the dollar store eons ago. It had been bothering me for awhile, but I just hadn't gotten around to doing anything about it.

Here are the "before shots".

 

Notice the black book on the left? That is my address book that has got to be about 15 years old AT LEAST. It is soooo out of date, I'm not even sure why I still have it. As you will soon find out, it DID NOT make it into the update! 

I had this charming vintage, coloured-glass jar that I picked up at a thrift store (you can read about other coloured glass pieces I've collected here).

 I thought it would be PERFECT to store the pens etc. And it is! See?

The wire handle holds the sticky notes just right and the lid works to store my clips. Did you notice the nicely coloured pens in the jar? A re-organized pen jar calls for some fancy pens! I dug them out of my craft area. I will get more use out of them on the shelf here than stuffed away in a drawer in the basement!

Here is the finished shelf (clearly my other shelves now need work).

Did you notice my addition? I wanted to add a little something extra to the shelf besides the phone and a jar for pens. I had some little  vintage books that I'd picked up at a thrift store a long time ago (these were also stuffed away in the basement). They are the perfect size and the red adds a little pop of colour. They are very beautiful OLD books and I think I will have to do another post about them someday soon. One of them is a New Testament from 1921!

In order to make them stand on their own, I fashioned myself some homemade book ends out of a cardboard box I salvaged from the recycle bin.

I cut out one corner of the box and cut it in half lengthwise.

I taped the two pieces together to fit the width of my book stack, and VOILA! The perfect book ends. I hid the cardboard inside the covers of the two end books, so they aren't visible from the front or sides.

What do you think? Was the shelf update a success? I am happy to be putting to use some items that were just sitting around not doing anything.

*My apoligies that my photos aren't the best, it was dark outside when I took these shots so the lighting wasn't the greatest.

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