Category: Organizing

Around the House, My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing

Don’t Just Talk About It, Do It; Day 5

Day Five on the schedule had me cleaning out my reading nook.

 

Before:

See all that stuff around the sides and underneath?  There’s only supposed to be three things around the bottom of that chair.

 

During:  Well, there are no pictures of during.  I was trapped in my bedroom trying out a new anti-inflammatory gel in an awkward location and couldn’t leave to get my camera, as it wasn’t dry enough yet.  So imagine the chair pulled out and all these items underneath it: 5 boy socks (none matching the others), 2 adult baseball caps, 1 adult apron from a job I had 15 years ago, a pile of trash paper about 8 inches high, a pile of stuff to be filed much smaller than that, an adult belt, a full sized ergonomic keyboard, a gamecube controller, 4 power cables (only one of which I couldn’t identify), my reading basket, a mirror, 2 wire hangers, a VHS tape cover, and a book & workbook for Twelve Extraordinary Women.  I pulled it all out, dusted it all off, put everything we were keeping away and everything else in the trash can, then swept up all the dust.

 

After:

One hour later, this is what my reading nook looks like.  There’s a round piece of glass that occasionally becomes a table top when we need it on one side of the chair (safest place to keep it), a mirror to cover the cable coming into the room on the other side, and my reading basket below the outlet (it contains extra bookmarks, magazines in progress, book holders, and book covers in case I’m reading something that might scare the kids).  Not pictured: my foot stool.  It looks so much better now!

Around the House, My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing

Don’t Just Talk About It, Do It; Day 3

It’s Day Three of the Challenge, which means it’s the beginning of Week 2.  This week I’m looking around at all my own messes in the house.  There’s a lot more of them than I’d thought I’d see.  This week I’m concentrating on my bedroom because that’s the room that always gets missed when we’re tidying up for company.  I’m really embarrassed to be posting these photos, y’all, but if this is what it takes to get me cleaning, then this is what it takes.

 

Today I cleaned up our bedside tables.  Mine is the one that everybody dumps everything they’ve found in other rooms of the house onto.  Everything.  Nick’s is the one where things get left when I need to take them into the bathroom and someone is in there (mainly necklaces and hair ties).

 

Before:

my side table & area

Nick’s side table & surrounding area

During:

I brought out the “Please Put Away” box again and dumped everything that wasn’t trash and didn’t belong there into it, which was nearly everything.

Then I swept the room, dusted, and sprayed & scrubbed the tables, tray, lamps, and tchotchkes.

 

Now:

my side table now only contains things I need to a) sleep or b) make my way through my reading list.

Nick’s side table only contains the clock radio and his lamp, really.  I need to find something cute to cover the clock with at night still (the numbers shine too bright even on low and I don’t like sleeping with a sleep mask on EVERY night).

 

Much, much better!  🙂

Around the House, My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing, Saving Money

Don’t Just Talk About it, Day One

So I went ahead and started today, just because.    Here’s what the desk area looked like before:

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A mess, I know.  I went and got my trusty helpers

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the trash can, the “please put away” box, my chair to hold the “to be filed” items, and the paper recycling bin.  I started tackling the desk by taking everything off it that was paper or didn’t belong in the desk area. I scanned in the entire pile of things sitting there waiting to be scanned, made a file of kids passwords so I wouldn’t have to keep up with a billion little scraps of paper, and finally registered all those games the kids got over the holidays.  Then I removed all the electronics and was left with this delightfulness:

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Okay, not so delightful.  I pulled the cords all out, too, and wiped them down, and then used twist ties (saved from bread bags) to tidy up their cordiness (I also labeled them with the remainders of sticky paper off the bottom of a book of stamps).  Then I wiped down the desk and used a bit of spray paint (leftover from another project) over the very obvious paint deficiencies there (You may all skip that step, really.  My husband will be quietly appalled.  The whole area needs a repaint job, but that will have to wait until it’s a bit warmer and we can open the house for extended periods of time).

 

After everything was dry, I started moving things back in, leaving some stuff out in the “please put away” box and rearranging other stuff.  I made enough space to put my scrapbooks back out where they belong, which made me very happy.

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The only thing I didn’t get to today was under the desk, but that required tools to take the old hard drive out of the old computer and I didn’t have time to go spelunking in the garage today on top of everything else.  I’m really quite pleased with the finished area, especially as it puts the file folders into better reach so that I might actually file the stuff that needs filing next time instead of it leaving on the desk.

 

Remember, if you’d like to link to this challenge,  you may link here.

Around the House, My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing, Saving Money

“Don’t Just Talk About it, Do It” Challenge

Beginning in just a little bit, I’m starting a new January challenge.  I really loved the one over at A Bowl Full of Lemons last January, but haven’t been able to find anything like it this year for the month, so I’m making one of my own.

Here’s the plan, each weekday I’m going to tackle a project that I’ve been talking about forever, but never get to.  I’m going to assign a day to each project and just work at it until it’s done or my time is up.  If you’d like to follow along and link to your own similar projects, I’ll include a linky at the bottom.  If you’ve got nothing similar, but just felt inspired to do something, anything that’s been on your list forever, link that up, too.  The more the merrier!

  • Week One starts now:

Thursday 1/5 Tidying up the computer area

Friday 1/6 Peeling up the remaining wallpaper in the bathroom

  • Week Two starts on Monday, it’s theme is basically “Starting with my own mess”

Monday 1/9  My bedside table is scary

Tuesday 1/10 My closet tries to eat stuff

Wednesday 1/11  My reading nook has crap under it

Thursday 1/12 Under the bed the drawers have found friends

Friday 1/13  The shelving units could be emptier

  • Week Three starts the following Monday, with it’s theme being “Places we hide stuff when company’s coming”

Monday 1/16 My eldest son’s closet has mostly my stuff in it

Tuesday 1/17 My youngest son’s closet is scarier than my bedside table

Wednesday 1/18 My middle son’s closet holds all the games

Thursday 1/19 The front hall closet I’m suspecting of having parties without me

Friday 1/20 Someplace else messy that’s not a closet 

  • Week Four’s theme will be “All the Stuff in the Universe:”

Monday 1/23 My craft desk is overflowing

Tuesday 1/24 My memory stuff is taking over

Wednesday 1/25 The garage needs tidying

Thursday 1/26 The media cabinet could be emptier

Friday 1/27 The piano & music center wants a shelf

  • Week Five is short because that’s all that’s left of January and I only have two bathrooms:

Monday 1/30 The kids/guest bathroom needs spiffying

Tuesday 1/31 My bathroom towel situation

On February 1st I’ll do a round up of before’s and after’s of all my spaces and then collapse into a heap for the rest of the month.


Around the House, Family Time, My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing, Parenting

B’s 8th Birthday Party

This day has been crazy.  I got up, had breakfast with Nick, then picked up my mom and went out to Hawkins to get the kids.  We got the full tour of the house remodel as it stands (bedrooms & bathrooms done, walls up but not sheetrocked for the rest of the house) and got to see G driving the tractor.  Sadly we had to leave quickly to get back home in time for B’s birthday party.  But wait, there’s more.  My mom told the kids “let’s stop by the bagel place” which I took to mean “let’s pick up bagels.”  Nope, we ended up stopping, eating bagels, visiting with G’s friend that we saw there, and then finally going back to my mom’s house.  I left the kids there and went home to clean.  I got it all done, got the cake decorated, got the party supplies out, and then the kids came back home.

I bought a cake from the store and added the giant Pokeball by hand, which actually saved me money as I didn’t have to buy all those different colors of frosting and little ball shaped confetti, nor did I have to pay for a custom cake:

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Our kids came back to our house not too long before the party.  While waiting for other kids to arrive, we decorated goodie bags with Pokemon stickers (that we already had and never used!). After all the kids arrived, we had Pokemon Training in the Battle Arena:
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Then we had Pin the Tail on Pikachu, a game thought of by my B. (And another money saver, as I had all the supplies on hand)
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After that we went fishing for Water Pokemon cards (for their goodie bags; the cards were purchased new for the event, the “fishing poles” were made of kid yard tools, string, and magnets we already had on hand):
Fishing for Water Pokemon

Then we took the kids back inside for a Pokemon Trivia game while other adults hid stuff in the backyard for the scavenger hunt. The kids made up all the trivia questions and I made the screen saver for the blu-ray player. If they paid attention to the screen saver, they got hints about the answers.
Pokemon Trivia Challenge

After trivia we went back outside for another game: Rocket Relay Challenge. The challenge was to get the balloons to hit the target after launching them in the air. We used the “pond” from the water game and put a target in the middle.
Rocket Balloon Relay

Then we played the Pokemon Evolution Game, which involved coccooning your Pokemon completely before they erupted out a newly evolved creature. (I bought toilet paper at the dollar store for this purpose and we didn’t even use it all)
"Your Pokemon needs to evolve. Help him get into his coccoon!"

"Your Pokemon needs to evolve. Help him get into his coccoon!"

Then we started the Scavenger Hunt. We hid Pokemon related things around the backyard and had clues to get them to the next place.
Scavenger Hunt for goodie bag items.
At each place they got a piece for their goodie bags, like a “pokeball,” a “pokemon,” some “berries,” and then “training tools.” (Balls, animals, candy, and bubbles all came from the dollar store.)

Bubbles!

After all that we had cake
Cake

and presents
Presents

and played Pokepark (B’s present from his grandma) on the Wii until parents came to gather up kids. It was a great party! 🙂

Organizing

Iheartorganizing’s Project Purge: Week 2: The Kitchen

I was a bit nervous to start in the kitchen, as I really didn’t think there was much in there that needed to go after all that tidying I did in January.  Boy was I wrong!

 

Photo1: In 2009 I only had one apron, that black one from the café I worked at in college.  It was ugly, so I acquired a few more in nicer colors, but soon realized a couple things: 1) lower half only aprons are silly & don’t help at all and 2) You can only wear one apron at a time, so why have a billion of them?  (That last one was the kids art apron, which they never wear these days)

Photo 2: Spare bits of things we don’t use any more.  Those glasses are from our wedding.  They’ve never been touched again.  One was broken immediately after this picture was taken.

Photo 3: These were all hanging on the walls of my kitchen.  They don’t go together well and were just taking up what I like to call “eye space.”  I took down one other picture, but it’s going in the “find another home in the house” pile rather than the “leaving the house” pile.

 

 

Not pictured: a pile of papers & shelf full of glass jars that got recycled and a coffee grinder that got tossed because it ceased to work (it should have gone to the recycling center, too, now that I think about it).  Also I’m making up a box of only-for-parties items that can go live in the garage, so I can make better use of the space in the kitchen for things I actually do use a lot (like my muffin pans & cooling racks, which are always impossible to get to).

Organizing

Iheartorganizing April Challenge: Week 1: Entry & Living Room

I’m following along with Iheartorganizing’s challenge to purge 30 items in thirty days. Jen urged us to start in our entry way & living room the first week and purge just 7 items in the first seven days. Well, I got excited. Love a little challenge. I got up to seven items in the entry way really fast, so I bundled a group of lost mittens together into a hat to count as one item, then left the rest of the stuff there as individual items.

Here’s some stuff I purged:

The hat full o’ mittens:
http://cid-e6becf9f2dd44744.photos.live.com/self.aspx/For%20the%20blog/DSCN1672.jpg

A pink fluffy wrap I wore once seven years ago:
http://cid-e6becf9f2dd44744.photos.live.com/embedphoto.aspx/For%20the%20blog/DSCN1669.jpg

The itty-bitty Alabama backpack none of the kids took to:
http://cid-e6becf9f2dd44744.photos.live.com/embedphoto.aspx/For%20the%20blog/DSCN1670.jpg

The plastic bag carrier some well meaning person bought me:
http://cid-e6becf9f2dd44744.photos.live.com/embedphoto.aspx/For%20the%20blog/DSCN1671.jpg

…and finally a broken wind scroll, a well-used box that’s broken inside, a pretty old tea tin, and a floppy hat no one wears:
http://cid-e6becf9f2dd44744.photos.live.com/embedphoto.aspx/For%20the%20blog/DSCN1691.jpg

Now on to the kitchen! 🙂

(ETA: I can’t get the photos to work today, so I’m putting links and leaving it be as I am running out the door right now)

Organizing

The Week that Wasn’t

I have to admit, when I looked at last weeks calendar in the days leading up to it, I was cringing.  Every night we had something we had to go to, people to see, things to do.  It was supposed to be rush, rush, rush, followed by a weekend of quiet rest.

Well, it didn’t happen that way.  On Monday Nick realized he’d forgotten to call the cub scouts and remind them about the meeting, so that got cancelled.  Tuesday the kids came home and said that the PE Exhibition for school was just for the cloggers and we are not them, so we skipped it (although we did still have piano lessons to go to).

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Wednesday we didn’t have a busy night planned, but a busy day.

 

A friend dropped off her child while she took another one to a marathon doctors visit and another friend and her children came over to play.  Everyone had a great time, ate lots of muffins, and played a lot of chase.  🙂
After the other family left, Greg and his friend had a picnic lunch on the back patio before her mom came to pick her up.DSCN1265
I was just going to sweep and mop Wednesday afternoon, but after you move all the furniture to do that, you get to thinking “Hmm, does it have to go back the way it was?” and so I just shifted everything around a bit more. Everyone says it looks a lot more welcoming. I agree. There are more photos from various directions on the flickr feed, of course (and you can just click this one to get a bigger version, too).
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Since we didn’t have an evening activity we headed out into the yard and helped Nick with the gardening. We planted several kind of flowers: cone flowers, zinnias, and some other kind that looks really similar. Nick doesn’t love the flowers, but he knows I do, so he put them nice places for me where I’ll be able to see them out the kitchen window and when driving in from the street.
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Thursday was a super busy day.  First of all, St. Patrick’s Day.  We got up, tuned the TV to the Holidays: Irish music channel, and tried to Irish dance (I took lessons as a child). DSCN1286 We had a traditional Irish breakfast: oatmeal pancakes (dyed green, of course), fried eggs, and bacon.  The big kids school has a dress code which does not include the color green, so they made a rule that no one can be pinched for not wearing green. Ben wore a little shamrock pin we made, though David was having none of it. Greg wore a green shirt & I made him a special shamrock sandwich for his lunch.
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After I got all the kids to school, I headed over to have coffee with my friend M & J, which was lovely.
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Came home and baked brownies and a strawberry cake for scouts, then picked up kids from school.  For our after school snacks, I had the kids make rainbows, then gave them a pot of gold (vanilla pudding – the off brand is really gold colored) to put underneath.  🙂  They LOVED it.
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That evening was the Blue and Gold Banquet, where the kids get their awards for the PInewood Derby.  One of the other dens brought lots of decorations to put out, so we helped with that. DSCN1298 A man came and talked to us about his dog and another one came in with all the badges & awards he’d gotten over the years on the way to becoming an Eagle Scout.  When awards time came, David was very cranky, as his car had broken on the track and couldn’t race, but Ben was ecstatic: he got 1st place for style and 1st place for speed in his den.  🙂DSCN1318

Friday morning Greg and I did a lot of laundry.  Then I ran off to my doctor’s appointment (I’m all good!) while Nick and Greg ran errands and picked up the big kids.  We packed up soon after to head over to Nick’s sisters house for dinner.  It was supposed to be a big event with several other families, but two of them ended up having to cancel, so it was just Mandy’s family, Mark’s parents & grandma, and us.  The kids had a fabulous time with their cousins.  🙂
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Saturday we had a nice quiet morning at home. We played games and took a walk. It was very peaceful (yes, it can be peaceful with three boys!). That afternoon I started getting texts from my best friend saying she was thinking of visiting, alone, that evening. So after church and various church related meetings, we headed home and hung out with her for a while. She and Nick talked gardening while I got guest space set up and the kids showed her everything in the house and all their latest tricks on the trampoline and sang her all their songs and did all their dances. Then she and I escaped their orbit and went out for a late dinner and some live music. We ate far too much, laughed lots and lots and took exactly one photo the entire time we were together (my camera battery had died and her memory card was full, so we were left with bad camera phones). p_00162 (2) We came back home and watched A Room With a View and stayed up far too late.

In the morning we sat outside with our coffee on the front porch and talked with the kids while Nick made breakfast. After breakfast I got a chance to show her all my latest things: jewelry, household organizational stuff, art, etc.) before she had to run back home and take care of her family (a three hour drive *sigh*).

After she left I decided to use all my leftover manic energy to clean the garage, something that has been on the To Do list for weeks. Eventually I enlisted the kids help, and then Nick helped me put together a shelf (he spent most of the day at work). I also put together the kids workbench that they’d gotten last November. When we started the day there was barely a path through the garage. By the time we were done there was enough space for the kids to ride bikes around inside it. 🙂 I still have some boxes to go through and purge, but the whole place looks so much better.
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After Nick got home from work, we worked in the garden for a while, the kids popped some little firework poppers, and Greg learned to fly a kite (he’s never done it before!).
IMG_2059 Then we headed over to my mom’s house for a movie night on her big screen TV. The kids loved watching The Seeker and now David’s all excited about reading the books it was based on. 🙂

So in the end we had a busy week, just not the one we’d had planned.

My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing

After the organizing was done…

So Kristal over at Kansas City Cristal wanted us to do an “AFTER ORGANIZING PARTY!” and I totally forgot that yesterday was Groundhog’s Day until someone in the house mentioned it this morning, so I’m just now getting around to taking my pictures.  I actually don’t have a whole lot to show you, as we really haven’t changed up anything too terribly much since the organizing took place.  I did wander around and look in all the drawers and closets, though, and will share some of the funnier things I found.

  • Day One: The Junk Drawer: I chose the kitchen junk drawer.  When I went back to look in it this morning I discovered something surprising: we have a new bright yellow microplane grater WITH A HANDLE!  I am totally surprised and completely happy about this, as our old one was just one long stick of grating, no place to grab on.  What a lovely surprise from my husband!  🙂

  • Day Two: The Computer Desk: This one I have a photo for:

  • Day Three: The Tupperware Cabinet:  Nothing new here, people.  My kids are so happy that they can find their stuff each morning that they make sure to keep this area tidy.
  • Day 4 – Linen Closet: This one looks a little different.  It had come to my attention that my decorating style had become less a style and more a “let’s see how much of the stuff I love I can get out on the shelves at once.”  So I started decluttering out in the living room a bit, then moved bit by bit through the house, taking 1 out of every 4 items down (or more).  I have to say that I really like the difference it made in the house.  The thing is that all this stuff, when it’s not out, lives in the linen closet.  So I tried to put it away neatly, like with like, and this is how it looks right now:

All of those places on Days 5-8 look exactly the same as the organization day.  I’m very pleased that we’ve been able to keep it all up.  🙂

Well, you saw in my post a couple days ago, we’ve redone the boys room.

Days 10-16 are all the same as well.  A few things added, a few things taken away, you know how it goes.  People use up one thing, another takes its place.  🙂

  • Day 17 – The Mail: This area got added to:

 

  • Day 18 – Keepsakes: These are still being worked on.  I have had a lot of difficulty going through and tossing cute kids stuff over the years, so there is just so much to go through.  Here are the notebooks I’ve made so far, neatly lined up in the living room so people can look at them whenever they want to:

I'm trying to go through another years worth of stuff each week, so I'll be done, umm, 6 weeks from now. But it's a manageable schedule for me, which means it'll get done.

 

 

Day 19 & 20 haven’t changed either.  🙂

  • Day 21 – You pick!: I picked our “Room of Requirement,” as everything extra from the organizing had been dumped there.  It looked pretty good after I was done with it, but it has improved a little bit on one side since you last saw it:

I changed out the blanket (going to make a cushion out of this fabric, but for now it's just draped) and added frames from the linen cabinet that I painted to match each other for a frame collage (my favorite is the mirror, which had been dark green & gold splatter-painted).

 

So there it is.  All still good and organized, which is a good thing because we’re having company over tomorrow and I need to focus on cleaning the areas that people actually see now.  🙂

 

 

My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing

ABFoL Organizational Challenge, Day 21 (last!)

Today, the last day of the Challenge, we were challenged to do a space of our own choosing.  Now I don’t know about y’all, but organizing my house has three main steps: 1) Identify the area to be organized. 2) Make surrounding areas messy while organizing target area. 3) Blissfully stare at newly organized area.  Did you notice something missing?  Something important?  CLEANING UP THE SURROUNDING MESS! Yeah, that’s the part I never get to.  So today I headed into that room that contains all the mess.  You know, that place you stash everything when your mom/neighbor/friend says they’re on the way over. In our house we call it the Room of Requirement.

Here’s an incomplete before (I totally should have photographed the closet, but I went in not intending to deal with that today; just imagine stereotypical boy mess):

Did that scare you?  AIE.  It scared me.

Here’s the after for the closet:

left side of the newly organized closet

right side of the newly organized closet

Here are many afters for the rest of the room:

This one gives the best all over affect of the room.  See how it’s more like a second living area now?

Starting over on the left next to the closet, the kids art & playdoh supplies

The Lego chest with Art Gallery above

The window corner with MegaBlocks & Art/Memory Bookshelf

My craft overflow shelves, scout supplies, science stuff, TV, & solitary games cupboard

Next corner: spare craft/computer/sewing table with light above

The crib-turned-daybed (the fourth side can also be a stand alone full size headboard). The blanket color is really not that lurid in real life, I assure you. It's pretty & subdued & nothing I do in the image editor fixes it.

So that’s it.  A minor miracle, if I do say so myself.  The kids are, naturally, scared to go in there now.  Whee!

I’m very glad to have joined all of you on this 21 day adventure.  My house is cleaner and tidier, my husband is, I think, happier with the house, and the kids are just happy that I’ve mostly ignored their room for the last couple weeks. I may do their room tomorrow. This got to be addictive. I can’t wait for another challenge!  🙂

My craft overflow shelves, scout supplies, science stuff, TV, & solitary games cupboard