Moving Monday!

Usually I post our fun muffin tin lunches on Monday but we did not have a muffin tin lunch last week so I'm taking the day off from that.

Moving Monday could mean so many things.

It could mean that I want to motivate myself to get in more movement - ie exercise - and while this is true it wasn't my true intent in the title.

It could mean that I'm moving houses or cities or states but that's not happening.

It DOES mean that I'm re-arranging some things in our home again. 

When we moved bedrooms around back in the fall we moved the school room to the landing upstairs.  I like the space but it's presented a couple of problems.  Problem one is that school is best done while Sierra is napping for the time being and her bedroom is upstairs right off the landing.  Problem two is that the kids' toys are all upstairs and I send them up to play in the mornings after breakfast and they often have (age appropriate) trouble with the boundaries of staying out of our fantastically fun looking school stuff.  This has been an issue for a while now but I've just been trying to live with it.  I just can't live with it anymore.  But WHERE?? will I put all of our school stuff??  I don't want it back in the dining room.  I like the clean streamlined look I accomplished in the dining room a long while back.  And then it occurred to me that the laundry room would be the perfect place to store things so they are accessible but out of the children's general life path.  Right now the laundry room has been a family closet.  KOJ and I moved our clothes out a month or so ago and into our bedroom.  So really it's just the kids' clothes and a junk dropping spot.  So we're going to move the kids' dressers/clothes upstairs to the landing and create a huge closet for our school stuff.

So this Monday I'm telling you about it and hopefully next Monday I'll have pictures of the finished product.  Don't worry though I plan to have a Muffin tin to post next Monday as well.

Organizing project week 4

The "coffee counter" in the kitchen was a wreck.  This happens often but I'm trying to keep it cleared off and neatly organized.  We put this shelf up on the wall to add a little bit of extra surface space as counter space in our kitchen is at a premium.

Before:

This shelf had become a bit of a collect all and just a hodge podge of mess.

 AFTER:

I removed everything that didn't actually belong on the shelf, washed the shelf, hung the menu board, added the basket to corral my instant coffee mixes.  It looks much neater now.  It's amazing how the neatness of one shelf can affect a whole room.  It was a simple project that didn't take me very long at all.  The basket I used for the coffees is from the dollar store.  I found that menu board at goodwill for .99!  Love great deals like that.

I used to have a coffee pot on the shelf but I moved it and soon I'm going to remove it from the kitchen altogether.  I rarely use it anymore after discovering the instant cappuccino coffee mixes.  Brewing a whole pot for one cup was always a waste.  I'll store the coffee pot in the laundry room with other occassional use appliances to be used when we have company or a party or something.

I'm very happy with how the shelf looks at the end of the day.

Organizing project - week 3

This week I'm going to show you how I organized the lego situation.  I got the drawers right after Christmas and the boys and my SIL helped sort them out by color.  But really today what I want to show you is this fantastic idea (which of course was NOT my own) of letting the kids each have an "in progress bin".  See they enjoy using the legos but my floor ends up looking like this:

An in progress bin will give them somewhere to store those pieces without having to put them all back in the right drawers every single time I want to walk without killing myself.

I just took the clear shoebox containers you can get at walmart or the dollar store and labeled them with a mailing address label - one for each boy.

And this is how it's been working out this week:

I moved the bins out of the dining room into the living room and moved in a nightstand I was moving out of my bedroom for the kids to use as a lego/play table.  It has been a BIG hit this weekend and has REALLY cut down on the legos on the floor.  It hasn't stopped it altogether because of little miss there but the boys are being better about it for the most part.


Oh and I got this idea from Jen at Iheartorganizing - GREAT blog to check out for lots of organizing tips and inspiration.

Organization project 2012 week 2

And I see it's Friday again.  Oops.  Life gets busy over here.  The girl child keeps me actively on my toes pretty much non stop.  Not to worry though because I definitely have an organization post for you.  Today we're going to look at under the kitchen sink.


Before:

After:

I found those baskets at the dollar store and LOVE them.  They are the perfect baskets for this space as they are tall and square.  They work great at containing our millions of washcloths, and our rags, trash bags, and extra pot holders.  We're a primarily cloth house - when the kids spill we grab a rag not a roll or paper towels.  So finding space to hold the cloth is important.  Having that space organized is kinda nice too.  This project was pretty simple and only took a few minutes but I love it and it makes a huge difference in the functionality of this space.

2012 Organizing project week 1

Ok so we had a great break off of school during the holidays.  Unfortunately somehow during that time the school room became a dumping grounds and not exactly a peaceful place to do school.  Our old set up was the school/playroom was downstairs and our bedrooms were upstairs, the kids in one room and me and KOJ and in the other.  A few months ago now we switched things around and it works great this way (I definitely had my reservations).  The landing upstairs is the school room for the k-4 and preschool boys and the first grader has a desk and his workboxes in his bedroom.  The majority of our toys are in the other bedroom and we gave Princess in there during school so she can't get into trouble or get into our school work.

So I apparently didn't think to take before pics but here are the after pics:

Preschool desk - Colton works on the left and Sawyer on the right.  The middle chair is mine.

activity bins - a couple phonics, a couple math, and a couple skills.  I change these weekly based on the theme of our school work that week.

our calendar, seasonal books, and my teacher closet

There you can see Kayd's desk and his workboxes.

I obviously didn't snap any pics of the other bedroom which is Sierra's play space during school time.  It feels great to have a clean and organized space.

organizing on the cheap update

So last week I talked about checking out the section on Organizing Made Fun  with the 31 days to cheap organization.  And I glanced through all 31 days of ideas this past week and implemented a few of them.  Some of them I've already implemented.

You might recall this post about my movie shelf make over.  Here's a pic to refresh your memory:


This organization project used cardboard boxes from our luvs diapers.  This is #2 on the 31 days cheap organizing list.

#9 is leftover containers and I used one that I didn't have a lid for here to organize our popcorn in the cabinet:

#10 is Jars and here I used a ragu jar to corral the straws for the kids' drinks:

How do you like that organizing within another organizing thing? lol  Yeah, I'm ON the ball!

The next one I'm not sure which category it falls under.  It's a washed out nesquik container that now holds our wooden spoons, spatulas, and other cooking utensils. 

Oh and it holds that lovely plastic rose my men brought home for me from grocery shopping one day.  Which I actually love.

#27 is the dollar store:

The coffee cup holders on the wall were from the dollar store.  The shelf was from a yard sale.  A nice 5.00 score.

#18 is baskets, I got these baskets for 1.00 on clearance after back to school time:

I have those baskets everywhere in the house.  They were up in one of the first pics, I have them in the sock cabinet in the living room.  LOVE them.

I have some other ideas too but either haven't implemented them or haven't taken pics of them yet.  Please remember to check out organizing made fun's list here and check out all of her other great tips!