Cereal box to In-box

In my kitchen "office" corner re-vamp, I realized an in-box was necessary.  Since our files are now kept in the garage I knew that I wasn't going to walk out to the garage to file every little paper as it came in.  Without an in-box of sorts, there would be papers all over the place or lost, etc. 
Weeeeellll...  I didn't have an in-box.  What to do, what to do?  I was inspired by the blog Choose to Thrive, in which the theme is "rock what ya got" and not spend anything.  I LOVE it!!  So I took a look around to see what I had.  I came up with a cereal box and a placemat. 

Not the most attractive thing.  It definitely needed to be covered with something.  I decided on a placemat from the Dollar Tree.  I only found one of these placemats at the time, and knew I could do something with it.  (forgive my lack of pictures and lacking tutorial.  I will get better at this, I promise!)
First, I cut one end and the back off of the box.  I also shortened the box a bit to just larger than 11", so it would hold standard paper size but not be too big. 

 

Then I cut a piece of the box end and taped it back on to create a lip to hold the papers in.

Then I set to work covering that box.  I cut the placemat apart, because it was two layers of this ADORABLE fabric.  Turned out to be just the right amount of fabric.  I just kind of wrapped it like a present, cutting where I needed to so it would fit and not be too bulky.  I hot glued it on as I went. 
Here she is, all covered and pretty:

You can see where it is pieced together in some places.

The back view:

The bottom didn't get covered, cuz who's going to look at the bottom?  Not even me, so it's fine. 

Perfect!  and FREE, which is awesome!!  Turns out it is fun to "rock what ya got".  What fabulous projects do you have that you didn't have to spend much on?