I knew that I would need a larger train case, because even if I only had 20% of my items in said traincase, it would have to be pretty big. Here's a photo of my eyeshadows, in their normal storage place. (In my closet. I know, I know…but the bathroom is too small and too damp to store them. I don't have a proper vanity area in this place. It's one of the things I plan on addressing…at some point.) There are 25 storage containers in the photo, and there are 3 more horizontally on top of the sweatpants stored atop the topmost rack. And then there are 3 more (black/white) that normally stand in front of the racks, when the closet door is closed. And then there are nine more (yes, 9) in the main area of my bedroom, because as I'm working through my backlog, I need to put the photo'ed-and-swatched eyeshadows into containers sorted by color, and there is no more room in the containers in the closet.

And that's just the eyeshadows. Granted, eyeshadows is what I have the most of. But I also want to rotate blushes, eyeliners, and lip colors through this hypothetical traincase. So…yeah. Big. It needs to be big.

Photos that show how the product actually performs...! See how I create my swatches

I also really wanted a traincase where I'd be able to see as many things as possible - similar to my current storage, where all the jars are stored so that I can open a given lid and easily see which color is in which jar. Otherwise, anything that's stacked under other things is, quite honestly, likely to be overlooked.

I looked at professional traincases. I looked at wheeled traincases. I looked at some softsided storage solutions that looked kind of cool…until I thought more about how I'd react/not react to certain types of storage. If I have to dig through the storage to find this and that item, I'm far more likely to just grab from the top one or two layers. A similar difficulty would happen with too many drawers: I'd open one or two to pick the day's colors, and that's it. I don't want the “on deck” solution to be so baroque and work-intensive that I end up not ever using it. At the same time, I need to figure out how to store this Subset Of Things so that everything is very easily accessible, and will not be easily overlooked.

I have my makeup brushes stored in such a way that the ones I use every day, are very easily within reach. Same with makeup remover wipes, primers (face and eye), finishing spray, serum, color corrector and BB cream, mascara, and eyebrow color/gel/stick/whatever-the-heck. I've recently rearranged my blushes so that all the BE glow powders - “radiances”, in BareMinerals' parlance - are stored separately from the other blushes. I still have to work on a good solution to the cream shadows, blushes, and - gulp - eyeshadows. I also need a better solution for storing my Sleek palettes than I currently use, which is simply stacking them in one of my clothes drawers where the empty space is the right side for the stack, and the folded clothes keep the stacked items from falling about when I open or close the drawer. But unless I specifically think about using them, they tend to stay in the drawer.

I will eventually figure something out. But…the idea still has to simmer a bit.

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