Project Simplify: Closets, Drawers, and Countertops

March 23, 2012 By 15 Comments

For this week’s Project Simplify project, I decided to tackle the paper pile that continually grows, gets cleaned off, and reappears on my kitchen counter.  This coincides with the two junk drawers in the kitchen as well.  I have tried to get a system for paper, but just haven’t created or maintained a good space to handle it all.  The plan has been to keep papers in one of the buffet drawers, but it’s just been a big mess.  And I end up keeping a constant pile of papers on the counter that I don’t want to forget about.  Here are a few Before pictures.

My kitchen counter which ends up being the catch-all for paper and junk

The junk drawers where papers get placed after being moved from the kitchen counter. This is in the middle of me cleaning them out.

After thinking through the system, I decided to get the paper out of the buffet drawer.  The drawer on the right still serves to hold various things, but I did clean it out and re-organize it.

No more paper! And since I freed up a drawer, I decided to spread out some utensils from another drawer that I frequently can't even open because it's so crammed!

Now, I can actually see what's in this drawer and it opens and closes without things getting caught! Ummm, I can't believe all that other stuff was in this one drawer!

Now for the new Paper Plan:

I bought some cute folders - 6 for $1.99. Not because I don't have a whole box of plain folders upstairs, but because cute is so much more motivating, isn't it?

All the papers (bills, coupons, invitations, cards, receipts, etc.) are now in categorized folders in this notebook. And there's a small bowl beside the notebook to hold all those random things I find throughout the day (hairbows, rubber bands, little toy pieces, etc.), most of which comes out of Ellis' mouth!

I still want a nicer looking solution than just this notebook sitting on my counter.  And counter space is a hot commodity in my house, so after some productive conversation with my mom today (my decorating and organizing consultant), I’m hoping to add a small piece of furniture with some drawers here:

 So my counter can look like this:

I would love to see how you organize the paper that comes into your house.  Leave a comment!  We all need ideas!

 

Project Simplify–The Pantry

March 16, 2012 By 4 Comments

Simple Mom is hosting a Spring Cleaning/Organization event this month called Project Simplify and this week’s project is kids’ stuff.

Our small fridge is really quite organized, so I decided to focus on the pantry.  For any of you who are new to Getting Through the Day, our pantry was originally intended to be the maid quarters.  It’s just a little larger than a twin sized bed.  When we moved in, there was actually a mattress on the floor!
I feel like I organize our pantry about once a month.  Because there’s constant food going in and out of it, it tends to get messy quick.  The biggest problem, however, was all of the things in the pantry that really don’t belong there…
…like golf clubs and an empty guitar case!
Do you see the box on the right of the top shelf in the picture above?  I’ve taken it down multiple times over the last few years, looked in it, and decided to keep the stuff that’s in it.  You know what stuff I’m talking about…the stuff that “I’ll keep because one day I might use it”.  It’s time to simplify and purge it!
We always have a lot of extra drinks sitting on the floor blocking our path after a big shopping trip.
And then, there’s the little bathroom beside the pantry.  Things that don’t fit in the pantry have spilled out into that space.
Maybe we should play a game of I Spy…  I spy a kitchen door, a toilet, a double stroller, a fire extinguisher, and some Sprite.  Unfortunately, after multiple attempts to fix the toilet, we finally gave up and just started stacking things in this space.
I pulled the two shelves out and cleaned under them for the first time in 5 years!

 We’ve always stuck the little vacuum cleaner hose under there to get the dirt, but after 5 years there was sticky gunk all over the floor.

I added a few baskets for food.  Because of the slats in the shelves, we had a lot of problems getting some things to stay on the shelves.  We also had to stack at the back so things wouldn’t fall off, so the fronts of the shelves were pretty empty.  The baskets gave us more usable space on the shelves.

I was able to take everything out of the room that wasn’t food or food related except for the vacuum cleaner, and was able to stack our extra drinks in the corner so they wouldn’t be in our way when we walk in and out of the pantry.

I didn’t change much in the “bathroom”, but I was able to get the kitchen door out of there!  Just in case you are wondering, we removed the door from the kitchen a few months ago.  The doorway is very narrow, and felt even smaller with the door.  So, we took it off!

If we can ever figure out how to get the toilet fixed, I’ll get the double stroller out of there as well!  And just in case you are wondering why there’s a double stroller in our pantry area, we actually use it for transporting all of our groceries from the parking garage to our 7th floor apartment.  Makes perfect sense, right? ;)
I love what I was able to accomplish in my pantry this week and that I can walk into it without tripping over things!  Have you been doing any spring cleaning?

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A Better Pantry with No Cost

January 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

When we were apartment hunting 5 years ago, we never expected to find an apartment with bathtubs, great storage, and a storage room!  Well, the storage room wasn’t really intended for that purpose.  It was intended as a bedroom for a live in house helper.  The room is the size of a twin sized bed!  We know…there was one in there when we found the apartment.  We removed the bed and found two large metal shelving units to maximize the storage in the room.  It’s now our pantry.

There’s one shelf in our pantry that has caused me to cringe almost every day since we starting using it.  That shelf holds all of our paper products, you know, all of those things that are small with odd sizes and shapes and don’t stack well.  I had taken care of part of the problem with a couple of small storage boxes, but the rest, well, it was just there for me to dig through whenever I needed something.

One day recently an idea came to me.  What if I used our empty juice boxes to create some shelving?  I started saving them and when we had 4, I used some packing tape to make a shelving unit.

They were a perfect solution to my paper product problem.

I love that after years (literally!) of feeling like there was no solution to my paper products problem, that I found one and that it was absolutely free!

Maximizing Space with Vertical Storage

December 16, 2011 By 3 Comments

When I saw today’s post over at I’m an Organizing Junkie, I knew that I had to write an unplanned post!

You see, her post is all about vertical storage.  Let me tell you, I am passionate about vertical storage!  I just took a few pictures around the house of some of the ways that we have maximized our vertical storage.  The kids are all asleep in their rooms, so unfortunately I can’t show you what we’ve done there.

This shelf is in the playroom.  It’s tall and we even use the top.   There’s a lot in that one vertical space!  Art stuff is in the shelf to the right.
This is a variety of art and homeschool supplies in the playroom.  It used to be a hanging closet with no shelving, but we removed the rod and had shelves installed.  A much better use of the space! 
China does vertical storage very well.  That’s one of the things that we loved about this apartment when we were searching for a place to live.  Each bedroom in the house has one wall of storage floor to ceiling!  The bottom closets are things we use often.  The top cabinets are seasonal things.
This is one of my favorite additions that we’ve done to our apartment.  We had tons of little spice containers and installed these three shelves on an empty space of wall in the kitchen.  The bottom two are spices and such, the top one  stores mostly coffee mugs.
This is the “house helper quarters”, a tiny room off of the kitchen that’s the size of a twin sized bed.  We put in two large, tall shelves that maximized on the horizontal and vertical space in the room.  We use these to store our “double ovens”, small appliances, food, etc.
The space under the master bathroom sink.  Because of pipes behind the left shelf, we couldn’t add the top shelf.  These sure maximize the space we have under there.
More shelves in our bathroom to maximize our small space.
I was so happy the day I did this!  This is on one of our closed in porches.  This is where we store everything that most people would put in a garage or an attic.  Do you see the suitcases on the right?  We have about 15 of them.  Many of them are nesting suitcases.  What you can’t see is that our old coffee table is under the suitcases.  We didn’t need it anymore but weren’t sure what to do with it.  It was perfect for stacking the suitcases!  Plus, we have the space underneath it to store other things we don’t use often like strollers and space heaters.  And yes, that’s my dryer.  The washer is on another porch, the one that has a water connection.  Unfortunately, there was no way to install them in the same location.
Living in a 7th floor, 1500 square foot apartment has it’s challenges when trying to find space for 6 people and all of our stuff–things that are used daily, seasonally, or things that are only pulled out once a year.  The greatest lesson I have learned in organization here is to think vertically!

Not Exactly The Container Store

September 22, 2011 By 3 Comments

The Container Store just opened a new site in Charlotte.  I haven’t gone yet.  I’m not really the shopper, browser type.  I usually like to have a specific goal, go in, buy it, and leave.  But this is not the case with organizational products.  I really could roam through those aisles for hours, more than shoes or clothes or jewelry or music.  Feels rather homemaker-nerdy, doesn’t it?  And while I would love to have the budget to sustain those designer, organizational sets for my kitchen or closets or office at The Container Store or Ikea or even Target, I just don’t.  However, this is the level I think and process on a lot, how to better organize all the stuff in the space I have to use it or hide it or store it more efficiently.  
I’ve noticed an unintentional trend in a lot of my cabinets lately…plastic bins.  I would like those cool roll-out shelves, but what I have are plastic bins I bought from Dollar Tree and ones I used in my former life as a first grade teacher.  I am admittedly a pack rat and have to talk myself through getting rid of anything, especially any type of storage container, that I just might be able to use again.  I found several white bins in our shed that used to hold books in my classroom, cleaned out the spider webs, and they work perfectly.  They appear in a few different places in my house…
  1. Every bathroom has them under the sink holding all the bottles of various lotions, makeup, extra toothpaste, and all the things I hoard or store under there.
  2. The toy closet has 6 small bins and 2 or 3 large bins for different kinds and sizes of toys.
  3. The laundry mini-room/large closet has 2 bins for dirty dish rags waiting to be washed and one for socks that have lost their mate hoping to be reunited.
  4. A lower cabinet in the kitchen now houses all plastic ware – kids’ plates, cups, bowls, utensils and all food storage containers.  There are bins for each type of dish – one with just sippy cups, one for plates, one for bowls, and one small one for utensils.  It really helps to pull out the bin of cups when I need to get some out without them all falling over in the cabinet.
  5. Another lower cabinet is like a corner cabinet, but poorly designed.  It’s really big but has a single door opening which means there’s this abyss of small appliances and large bowls that you can’t get to.  I have hated it for the 6 ½ years we have lived here.  It’s always a mess and you have to almost unpack the entire cabinet to get to anything.  So this year I pulled out some trusty plastic bins that are large enough to hold several items in one but small enough to move around and get in and out of that darned cabinet door.   Why didn’t I do that sooner?


While I still love the idea of permanent pull-out shelves, I’m probably too frugal/cheap to ever invest in them.  I did look into it once but just couldn’t swallow the price.  Maybe if we ever build a house I’ll have them included in all the cabinets. Until then, my dollar store and old classroom bins work just fine.

Functional and Decorative?

August 30, 2011 By 2 Comments

My mom’s house is beautiful.  She has a decorative taste that is simple but warm.  It’s not too cluttered but there’s a nice touch to every area and she is my #1 decorating consultant.  She knows my style and knows how to communicate with me about it.  She knows I’m incredibly functional and don’t ever want to be or seem extravagant in my home, but I want things to be nice, warm, and welcoming.  She is good at tolerating me while shopping.  I am a very impatient shopper, wanting decisions to be quick and clear and I don’t really enjoy browsing multiple stores.  I’m also not creative, can’t imagine things, don’t put colors together well, but am very opinionated in what I do and don’t like once I see it.  Don’t you want to go shopping with me?  Well, my mom has this great tactic of taking me to a corner of a store, selecting different items she thinks I might like, and laying them out together so I can visualize what it would look like in my house.  Then as she notices the looks on my face, she switches out different items to see what I like.  Finally, I choose something through all that help.  I won’t mention how she also takes it home for me, unpackages everything and helps me set it up.  (great mom, huh?)  Lately, we haven’t had as much time to go out shopping together and once I choose something for a room, it’s a loooong time before I change it.  She’s gotten so good at it that now she can usually just pick out something for me and it’s perfect.  
Growing up (and now), my mom has always had her table set with a centerpiece and decorative placemats.  I really like the finished look of a table like that.  When I was pregnant with the twins, I was working on rearranging my kitchen to make room for 2 highchairs and a booster seat at my table and my sister-in-law Dana was helping me move things around.  We were moving the table to different places and kept moving the placemats back and forth and finally Dana asked me, “Are you really going to keep setting your table everyday after every meal?”  
And I just thought, of course I am.  I always have.  Well, I will admit with more people at the table, it was starting to get annoying to find a place for the centerpiece and placemats with matching napkins during breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  And finally my middle daughter, Landis, pulled the basket of decorative ceramic balls off the table onto the tile floor.  I didn’t replace that centerpiece after cleaning up ceramic pieces for days.  So, for my birthday, I told my mom I wanted a new, small centerpiece with a table runner.  I was thinking it was just one thing to move around during meal time, but I wasn’t thinking (as my mom was) that a table runner and 4 little ones probably wasn’t a good idea.  It would be so easy for little hands to pull that table runner off the edge.  So, again, mom to the rescue.  She bought me the perfect thing, a single placemat with a vase of flowers to serve as the centerpiece.  It has all the right colors and is one small thing in the middle of the table.  I can slide it to the side or just move that one piece off the table.  Beautiful!


1 Year???

August 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I know everyone says it when their children’s birthdays come,  but I can’t believe my babies are one!!!  I was talking to my twin mom friend, April, this morning and she was commenting how this is just as big of a day for me as it is for the babies.  I made it! The first year with a baby is always challenging, but it sure is a doozy with twins!  I want to use this space to share different things I do or get help about various topics to get through the day.  So today, the biggest thing that’s happening in my house to help me get through is feeding the last bottles!  I have prepared bottles practically every day for the last 2 years solid.  I have poured, measured, blended, heated, and shaken so. many. bottles.  When my second daughter finished with bottles, we handed them straight to the twins.  They were born and she turned one 7 days later.  With the twins, we started with 16 bottles a day and today we feed the last two.  It’s really an unbelievable thought to me.  



   I have rid our house of bottle warmers, dishwasher baskets, drying racks, cans of formula, and 24 bottles.  I had designated an entire shelf in one of my kitchen cabinets for all that gear. So when I cleaned it all out, I had to re-evaluate my cabinets.  What could I use that space for?  I had already purged so much when I was pregnant that I really didn’t need extra space for dishes, but my pantry had been feeling cramped.

Here’s how my pantry was organized:
Top shelf – storage: very high, so it’s space for things not used everyday
2nd shelf – breakfast: cereal, oatmeal, syrup, grits, muffin mixes, etc.
3rd shelf – cans: almost anything canned, beans, veggies, etc.
4th shelf – snacks: , chips, cookies, and my husband’s ever-growing collection of hot sauces (he totally wants to be the Sauce Boss!)
5th shelf – starches – pasta, potatoes, rice
6th shelf – baking: flour, sugar, oil, baking mixes, etc.
Floor – more storage: paper products, other random items
Pantry rack – medicine, spices, ziploc bags, foil, plastic wrap, etc.

Well the problem was those bottom two shelves.  My baking items always overflowed to another shelf and they were hard to get to.  And, to be honest, it always bugs me when I designate a space for something and it doesn’t fit there anymore.  The oil on the shelf with the rice bothered me!  (I do know there are bigger things in life.  Just being real.). :) .  So, the verdict was to move all the baking items to the newly available cabinet and separate the snacks completely from the sauces, including spaghetti sauce and other seasonings.  Anyway, I think I like it.  My baking items are also more accessible when I’m cooking, which is a plus.  Isn’t it true that we will always fill the space we have no matter how much stuff we have and no matter how big or small our space is?

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