Bringing Good Home

Toys.

They’re like rabbits.

They multiply when you’re not looking. And then those multiply. Next thing you know…

They’re EVERYWHERE. *Insert creepy music from Psycho here.*

(Switch to happy, peaceful music. Think: “The hills are alive or something…”)

It doesn’t have to be that way! Roll up your sleeves and get creative. Organize, organize, organize. Purge, purge, purge.

But the best thing that has ever helped us, ever, is..

CONTAINERIZING. Into individual toygroups.

Little, happy communes of Barbies, Ponies, and baby dolls.

Last December, during “The Elephant Project,” the girls’ toys got containerized. We grouped each into an appropriate box or bucket and gave every single little thing a place to go. Recently, after I reorganized the school area and removed a bookcase, I reorganized some and used the bookshelf to create some vertical storage in their oh-so-tiny bedroom.

The result? Everything now has a place to go, they know where it goes, and it’s actually easier for them to put their own things away. Even if they destroy their room completely (which they still do on an all too frequent basis) - it’s not too difficult to restore order.

For example:

In December, three other ladies and I spent the better part of a day cleaning and organizing their room.

Today (their room was no less worse than it was in December), it took the girls and I about an hour and a half. Maybe two.

And that’s with the three kids’ awake and underfoot.

And that means something.

So here’s what we already had as of December:

The two small striped storage containers hold ALL the Barbie stuff: the dolls, the clothes, the shoes, the accessories, the wedding set, the animals… everything except the horse and wedding carriage which are too large. The large striped container contains all the dress up dresses, shawls, and wings (and it can hold an AMAZING amount of dresses and such squooshed in there!)

This toybox holds all the dolls, doll things, and doll clothes (and if there is anything miscellaneous like a toy camera, that goes in there too.) The yellow hanging Ikea organizer is for the stuffed animals. It seems there are some missing. I bet they’re in the little boys’ room; we haven’t cleaned that one yet.

And here’s what we’ve added this month:

I added the bookcase to hold the play vanity (which had been on top of the white dressor,) the pink buckets (which had been tucked under the bed each half full of My Little Ponies — now one is full of ponies and the other is full of all the dress up accessories, which had been in white baskets under the tv,) the baby doll carriers (which were also tucked under the bed) and the barbie carriage and pony (which were also, yup, tucked under the bed.) Now it’s all in one place and easy to get to and I even freed up two white baskets. Yay!

Also, check out the inside of the fridge!

Everything related to food and grocery shopping is store INSIDE the fridge. They can pull it out, play with it and put it all back very easily.

Having all these homes for different toys has really helped my girls with learning how to take care of their own space. I’m working on something similar for Little Prince’s room, but it’s not finished yet. Hopefully soon!

NOW… there’s one more thing that really helps with the MESS.

We try really hard to emphasize and remind them to put one group of toys away before pulling out another. When they do (and when we pay attention and remind them to do it) it really works! But when they don’t, well, it turns into a disaster pretty quick.

But having a place for it all to go is the first step.

Working on the habits… well, that takes times but it’s a whole lot easier to work on those with a system they are able to maintain.

And that’s the truth.

Kids’ toys was our assignment for June’s Organizing Round-Up hosted by Laura, the Organizing Junkie. Sadly, I forgot to take before pictures. But it looked a lot like this (taken when I cleaned up their room and worked on their closets for last month’s challenge)…

The tall bookshelf in the school room has been through a lot of transformations over the last year and a half. It has pretty much been some variation of having school books on the top two shelves and small toys and books for Little Prince on the bottom two shelves. All of the girls reading books have been on the small bookcase in the corner. It looked something like this:

Little Prince is bigger now, though, and can easily dig things out of his toybox. Also, he was developing a bad habit of dumping all the baskets on the bookshelf out at once. Because of that I recently I took all the toys off and put them into the toybox instead. So earlier today the bottom was empty, and the top looked like this:

I pulled off a bunch of completed worksheets and workbooks that can be stored, moved the reading books over, and then it looked like this:

And then I employed an organizing trick to make it more visually less cluttered (grouping books by size or color or a combination of both) and now it looks like this:

Here’s my purge pile. Most of it went into a box to be stored away as proof that my children do actually do school work here. It should be more organized, but for now it’s all together in a box. Other than a stack of folders and a few blank worksheets that need to go back into the surplus, the rest of it went in the garbage.

Now the little bookcase is empty (or it will be once I find a home for the coloring books) and I can move it out of the school area entirely. You can read about the last time we tackled the school area and see more pictures by clicking here.

Tackle It Tuesday is hosted by 5 Minutes for Mom.

May is over. June is here. It’s time again for Laura’s Monthly Organizing Round-Up. This month’s challenge was the kids room - in part, in whole, or whatever! My chosen task was to organize the kids’ closets.

I mean, yeah, we organized them when we originally organized the kids’ rooms for the first challenge. At that time, there was still a large amount of stuff going back into the closets. It was organized, it was accessible, it worked. But it was still quite full.

Since then, I’ve reorganized the girls’ closet once or twice. Once when my friends came over and helped me in December. It still looked pretty good.

But the other closet - OH BOY. In the last year and a half we’ve used up some of our due-to-over-clutter-overstock, we’ve acquired some new things, we’ve been lazy about putting back some other things, we’ve gained new baskets, we’ve emptied others.. and then it looked something like this :

(As always, the pictures are linked to larger ones.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Look at these! I mean, how beautiful is that? Doesn’t it just warm your cheeks, make them glow, give you the chills? Honestly it makes me feel giddy.

And they were FREE. A gift from my sister-in-law as she cleaned out her storage shed. She had extra storage bins - and she thought of ME. *sniff* See? *sniff* That’s love right there.

Of course I instantly starting counting off on my fingers all the many ways I could use them. Last week I replaced the two shoe bins in the girls closet with these four.

In case you’re wondering: YES, they are labeled, and the girls ASKED me to do it. Girls after my own heart.

I’m taking the old purple ones for myself, to replace the white ones over the washer and dryer so that they can go in Little Prince’s closet. I mean, really, does he need purple ones? I think not. I’ll just take those, thank you.

Laura’s challenge for this month is the master bedroom. Seriously? Man, mine is still organized from the spring challenge last year!

Amazing, isn’t it? I mean, yes it has gotten a little cluttered and dirty sometimes, like when we got behind on laundry and it backed up in our room. But then you do laundry and it’s clean again.

But we’re not talking about clean. We’re talking about organized. And as far as organization goes, everything is still in place. It’s still working. With a few minutes of clean-up I’m able to transform our room back into the sanctuary it is supposed to be.

Hallelujah and praise God! God can teach an old messy some new habits!

So back to the challenge…the only thing that I really didn’t organize before was the small drawers across the top of my dresser. I think I did one of them. Sadly most of what was in them had probably been in there for a loooong time. Here’s the before:

What you see here is:

• pair of old glasses, 2nd pair of current glasses which needs a screw replaced, old prescription sunglasses in case, empty glasses case, glasses cloth
• cover for dvd player, 3 remotes
• Power of a Praying Wife/Husband prayer card books
• 1 screw, 2 buttons, 3 pushpins
• hand lotion, foot lotion, 2 wooden back massagers
• old purse
• necklace, a wooden jewelry box
• loose change, $2.22 to be exact
• box of small ribbons for a quilt my mom made when I was little - that I do still have in the closet. also a small bag of ribbons that should be in the box.
• miscellaneous receipts
• dental floss
• keepsake garter from my wedding
• 2 extra cartridges for my labeler
• an eraser, and a rubber stopper - from my baby gate?
• hair clip
• taper candle
• 2 boxes of matches - for all the candles!

It doesn’t like look like all that stuff is in there, does it? Yeah, well, it is!

The first step was to pull it ALL out.

The next step was to assess what I had, what I wanted to go back in the drawers and how I could group them together. After putting everything else in the trashcan or a new, more appropriate home, this is what we’ve got now:

1. I know what I’m putting there but I’m not showing you!
2. The current book I’m reading for before-bed reading, and a place to store my glasses when I put the book back.
3. Boxes. The jewelry box, which doesn’t fit in my standing jewelry armoire. The box of ribbons that I haven’t decided what to do with yet. The box of matches, again, for all the candles. I like candles. I have them all over my house.
4. Everything related to the skin - the lotion, the floss, the lip balm, etc.

So that’s it. It was a quick and easy task, really. Which is great because with all that we had going on in the month of April, I didn’t have time for BIG challenges.

So hats off to all who accomplished something for the Roundup, whether it be big or small. A step in the right direction, regardless of size, is still a step closer than you were before.

The Monthly Organizational Round-Up is hosted by Laura at I’m An Organizing Junkie.

Mrs. Darling at Dishpan Dribble has invited a small amount of “controversy” in her post “Mrs. Darling’s Instruction for Home-Keeping,” and the benefits, or rather the pit-falls, of Home Management Binders. While she does have a very good point, and I’ll get to that in a minute, I felt the need to GOOD-NATUREDLY defend my very own Home Management Binder. Because you see, unlike Mrs. Darling, I just love it.

A little about my ‘Home Management Binder’ as I loosely call it, mostly for lack of anything better to call it.

As you can see, it’s nothing fancy - only the artwork of Little Prince which I haven’t bothered to try to clean off yet. Priorities, my friend, priorities.

At the very front I have a yearly calendar (which I use mainly to mark scheduled vacations and holidays for school since we go year round,) and monthly calendars for this month and next month so that I can write down when bills need to be paid, appointments, etc.

Next I have a section for my home. The main component for this section is my re-usable daily task sheets, with daily, weekly and monthly tasks. I tend to be a bit scatterbrained, easily distracted, and yes a bit obsessed with perfection. No, my home is not perfect. But without focus and goals I can find myself spending and entire day only on one room.

For example, the living room can be de-cluttered, vacuumed, vacuumed under every piece of moveable furniture, de-cobwebbed, the couches can be vacuumed, the cushion covers washed, the wood arms and slats cleaned and polished, the tv screen cleaned, the back and under the tv and electronics dusted, the tv stand cleaned, the books on the bookshelf straightened and re-organized, the bookcase dusted and cleaned with wood cleaner, the movie rack straightened and dusted, the fishbowl cleaned, the windows washed, the curtains washed, the piano can be polished, the picture frames dusted, the walls wiped down, the baseboards cleaned… see my point? Throw in preparing meals and schooling and Big Daddy would come home to a pile of dirty dishes and laundry and various other undone tasks. To help, I sat down one evening after the kids went to bed and made a list of everything I could think of in each room, prioritized them and arranged them by frequency, and divided them per day. The next night I plugged my lists into Excel spreadsheets, and since I slipped them inside sheet protectors I can re-use them with a dry-erase marker, meaning that I don’t have to reprint them unless I decide to change them. The goal here is not inflexible legalism, but rather focusing on the tasks for the day and leaving the other tasks for the other days so that I’m not overwhelmed by the constant stream of endless tasks. ‘Worry’ today about what needs to be done today, ‘worry’ about tomorrow when it gets here.

Next I have sections for myself and for my husband. Mainly consisting of things we each receive in the mail that require action, both sections also have a page protector to serve as a pocket for things I don’t want to punch holes in, like the property tax papers for my husband’s business.

The next section is an important one- the section for bills that need to be paid. When I open the mail, bills get marked on the calendar at the front and then filed into the bill section until it’s paid. When it’s paid (usually over the phone or internet) I mark on the bill with the date and reference number and then file it in the expandable file. Since I’m trying to switch to paperless billing, I’ll be creating a simple spreadsheet in excel to record that information. When I do that will go in this section also.

The expandable file is kept with the binder, and will be used to collect everything financially related over the entire year. When it’s time for taxes - it will all be in one place. And that will be something for the record books, to be sure! Though I’ve been using my binder for over six months, the expandable file is a recent addition. I’ve moved everything from the last three months over from the binder to the expandable folder so we’re off to a good start for taxes.

The remaining sections are a bit less-interesting: Kids, Special Projects (I used this section a lot when I was helping out with the ladies’ brunch but I don’t have anything going on at the moment), School, and the last one is blank with room to grow. I might file prescription info for the kids until they’ve finished taking them, or information for school curriculum I wish to purchase, etc. By far these last sections are used less than the first sections.

So that’s it. Nothing fancy. I already had the old binder, the sheet protectors, the dividers and pink card stock here at the house. I didn’t spend an extra penny on it since my main goal was function over frills and so far it has served me well.

It’s still a work in progress, too. I’ve worked on it a little at a time, refining, changing, adding. I have plans to add phone and address lists, and maybe a few other things. But I work on it as I get time. I have some days where I don’t use it, but the days when I do I usually get more done.

Now, I can appreciate the fact that Home Management Binders aren’t for everyone. Shucks, you might be organized enough without it. Or maybe you’re not the organized type and hate sticking to lists and guidelines. But if you’re not organized at all and you’re hoping that making a binder is going to fix everything for you, well, I’m sorry to tell you that it won’t. It’s not a magic wand.

My binder has served as a functional way to focus my efforts. But there has been a mountain of effort behind that. I have learned that I simply will not get enough done around my home if I don’t:

• Get up early! Yes, it’s sad, but true. Alas, for I like sleeping in late. (Proverbs 6:6-11)
• Get busy, and stay busy frequently throughout the day. (Deuteronomy 5:13)
• Foster good habits, such as folding the clothes straight out of the dryer, unloading the washer as soon as it’s done, and cleaning up immediately after dinner. (Proverbs 14:23)
• Establish a routine. It doesn’t have to be detailed. However, if you get up, eat breakfast, start school and have naptime at approximately the same time each day, the day will have a certain natural flow to it.
• Most importantly, I must meet with God first! I used to be a bible-study-at-night kind of person. Now I find that if I spend time in the morning studying God’s word, praying with him, and seeking his will from the start of my day, then the rest of my day with flow more smoothly and I’ll be able to keep a true perspective on my goals for the day.

All these things together still do not make for a spotless or perfect home. I have three small children for cryin’ out loud! But it will help things run smoothly– and a well-managed, smooth running, fully functioning home is the number one thing that makes the biggest difference in our attitudes and relationships with each other. After 10 years of marriage I have finally learned that this is the 2nd most important thing I can do for my marriage. (Number one should be obvious.)

Having said all that… I absolutely DO agree with Mrs. Darling’s diagnosis that spending too much time on making the binder and not enough actually doing the cleaning will completely defeat the purpose of the binder in the first place! The binder should not control me, consume me, or define me. It should strictly be a useful tool.

I also agree with her diagnosis that the best thing you can do for a clean home is just to get up and clean. Hasn’t that been my battle cry for 2008? “Just do it!” I was just telling my Princess yesterday that there will be many things in life that we have to do but don’t want to do. I hate dishes but they have to be done. If we learn to just do what needs to be done, life will be a little bit easier for us.

So I just do it. But I do it with the help of my binder. I have always been a list maker. I love lists. I probably always will.

So whatcha think? Are you a binder person or no? Weigh in and speak up. I’m interested to know!

What do you get when you take several weeks of mail, one tiny space, one busy mom, and one lacking plan?

You get this:

What do you get when you add one giant stack of mail, one letter opener, one trashcan, and a couple hours of time while the kids do school?

You get this!

The mail you see in the picture is what Big Daddy brought home with him later. Everything has been opened, purged and added to the “To File” pocket in the binder. I even acted on some of the action items as soon as I opened them - yay!

The only thing left to do is (today) go through that small stack and file it in the home management binder if it still needs to be paid or into the expanding file -which I pulled out of the desk and added here- if it just needs to be filed away.

Also, if we had to exit the house quickly for some reason and there was time to grab other things besides the kids, I’d be able to grab this binder and expanding file and have most of what I need. There are other things in the filing cabinet that it would really stink if I lost, but I can work on a plan for that. This scenario has happened once when a controlled burn near our house got out of control and we had to vacate in case the firefighters couldn’t get it under control. We had time to pack a small suitcase, grab THE favorite stuffed animal and THE favorite Barbie doll and throw the animals into pet carriers and that was about it. At that time, our filing system was, well, a joke, and I remember realizing that I had no way to save our important documents in case of emergency - and that I needed to remedy that. So here’s one step closer to that plan!

Updated: Those “to file” papers are now filed. *Exhale.*

• Tackle it Tuesday hosted by 5 Minutes for Mom

There’s nothing like waiting until the very last minute to complete a project, eh?

March is over and so is the March Monthly Organizing Round-Up at I’m An Organizing Junkie. As I’m working my way through my home as well, I thought I’d follow along with her Round-Up as much as possible so today I re-organized my dining room (though I’ve been thinking about what to do for weeks, really.)

The two main problems with my dining room were organizing the space and organizing the crazy power cords - both due to having a computer desk in the corner.

My first priority was to determine if there was any way to reorganize the space and move the desk out of the dining room. I did a little bit of rearranging when I worked on the kitchen, but the desk just shifted to a different corner, which shifted the table out past the end of the dining room wall, which required the table being pushed against the wall so that it didn’t stick into the walkway too far and so that the chair on the end could turn around for the desk also.

My second task, whether I was able to move the desk or not, was to deal with the cord clutter. The router and modem need to be accessible but out of the way where they can’t be bumped or messed with by the kids. So my husband moved them from the top of the computer tower to the top of the microwave which was better for them but bad for cord clutter. Also, the cord for the microwave barely reached the power strip so it couldn’t rest on the ground, which didn’t seem very safe and also allowed the modem to become unplugged occasionally. Not pretty.

I didn’t necessarily follow Laura’s PROCESS, since it wasn’t that kind of an organizing project, but I did spend time thinking over the various options before I began. I named my specific goals and considered how each option would meet those goals.

After moving the desk to the living room, the filing cabinet to the bottom of my closet (there’s a rhyme and reason for that, I promise), and hanging the router and modem on the wall, this is what I have now.

The table is far away enough from both walls we can really get around it! And, hey, I can even get back there to sweep up the kid crumbs, how’s that for novel? Notice that you really can’t see any cords… they follow down the back corner of the microwave cart and then behind the curtain to the plug. Yay!

This is the finished message/work space. I moved the picture-converted-message-board I had above the microwave because I wasn’t using it and replaced it with the calendar from the fridge. My home management binder, phone book, and hole punch are to the left of the microwave.

When I get home I can throw away the junk mail, temporarily stash the mail in the sorter (obviously I need to work on the temporarily part), then later hole punch them and add them to the home management binder for action or file them away in the filing cabinet. During the day I use the top of the microwave to lay open my home management binder and check the chore lists or the bills that are due.

After I finish going through the mail, my last remaining task for the dining room is to make new curtains. One thing I learned/remembered when I made new curtains for the kitchen is that nice curtains can go a long way towards creating the mood of the room. (You know, as opposed to, say, a flat bed sheet.) But that’s not, you know, organinizing… so as far as that goes the dining room is done. Yay!

That might sound a bit melodramatic. Who- Me??

And yet, my kitchen has been given a new lease on life, in the sense that the kitchen has gone from a room that I didn’t care for very much to a room that I actually enjoy.

Nothing against my kitchen specifically. It’s just that kitchens aren’t all that fun. You’re either standing at a hot stove and sweating and cooking up a meal (that’s let face it, somebody is going to complain about,) or you’re standing at the sink scrubbing dishes and sloshing icky water - and I don’t like icky or sticky or slimy or gross-anything touching me. Ewww.

But that’s all a matter of perspective and attitude, isn’t it? Gee, God’s been teaching me a lot about that lately, hasn’t He?

And it helps that I’ve decided to change my attitude, roll up my sleeves, and spruce my kitchen up with a little reorganization rather than just harboring bad thoughts about the room I spend most of my time in each day. And Laura’s Monthly Organizational Round-Up gave me a little bit of motivation to stay on task, too.

If I talked about and showed pictures of everything that I have worked on in the last month, well, we’d be here a while and you’d quit reading before you ever got to the end. Suffice to say that I have dug through every single cabinet and workspace in my kitchen and left no corner untouched. It was a thorough job. Some of the cabinets were in pretty good shape from when I did a little bit of reorganizing back in the summer, and some of them got a total overhaul. So how about I just show you a handful (or two) of pictures and talk about my new favorite spaces in my “new” kitchen?

First let me say that my initial goal was to improve the “view” that Big Daddy gets when he first walks in the door (since that’s the door he comes in when he gets home.) I realized, after a friend pointed it out, that my least favorite room in the house is the first thing Big Daddy sees when he gets home, and that the first part of the kitchen he sees is the front/top of the fridge and the bakers rack - both of which were overrun with clutter. Not a very welcoming sight. My original goal when I started this task was to improve my husbands first impression when he walks in the door. And then of course the reorganizing just spread like wildfire! Read the rest of this entry »