Organization Inspiration

I love an organized home. That has been one of the challenges of having a new baby. I had grown accustomed to having things stay in their places for the most part. But now my living room looks like this every day:


The adjacent kitchen doesn't fare any better, because
he can tear apart it apart in record speed. I am reminding myself to surrender to this season because I do know that it's only temporary.

However, I still love organizational strategies, and I thought I'd share one of mine that really works!

Tim and I had a folder stuffed with recipes that were printed off the computer, ripped out of magazines and newspapers, and on recipe cards. Each time we wanted to cook something, we would rummage through the pile looking for our tried and true recipes, but they got lost amidst scraps of paper and the many recipes there was NO WAY we would ever get around to making.

Often, Tim and I found ourselves asking each other, in frustrated tones, "Did you put the recipe for X back?" Later we'd find it in another stack of papers, stuck to the fridge, or shoved somewhere in the folder.

Next, I tried putting everything on the computer, but I found it awkward to cook while looking at a screen, and I didn't want to let go of some special old recipe cards from family members.

The solution that has worked for us the past 3 years is surprisingly low-tech. The reason it works so well is that it's crystal clear to both cooks how to use it, so we each follow the system!

Supplies:
Large 3 ring binder
Tried and true recipes on cards, printouts or from magazines (I suggest being selective and only including recipes you will cook!)
Plastic sleeve protectors
Sharpie

Put 2 recipes in each sleeve, one facing front one facing back. The order is not important because all recipes will be equally accessible. Category is not important either. My previous attempts categorized things by type of dish, but I find this much simpler. Because there aren't hundreds and thousands of recipes, they won't get lost.

With a Sharpie, number the plastic sleeves. (Remember when I made that ice cream cake for Jack's 12th b-day?)




Write or type up a table of contents with a name of dish and the recipe number. We have about 75 recipes so far.

When we need a recipe, we look at the table of contents to find out what number the recipe is, then take out the sleeve to cook with in the kitchen. A bonus is that if we splatter on it, it wipes clean.

Because the number is on the sleeve, the recipe always finds its way back to the proper place in the binder.

I use Pinterest and magazines to find new recipes to try, and IF they make the cut, they get added to the binder. I hope someone finds this ridiculously simple idea helpful. What is your favorite way to organize recipes?

My LOVE of streamlining and organization led me to discover an awesome deal on a HUGE "Bundle" of online resources that includes eBooks, eCourses, and even printables to help me in my home. While my goal was organization, I was thrilled to find out that it included MANY other topics of interest to me as well: home decor, goal setting, recipe books, saving money, parenting, and even faith. It feels like Christmas in April to me! Don't let the "Homemaking" title fool you. There is something for everyone here! There are only a few days left in which to purchase this bundle, so I wanted to be sure to share it with you here: 

Home Organization Ideas

The kitchen table is covered with binders, and I currently have a pair of field hockey shin guards hanging from the knobs of my kitchen cabinets to dry.  But the cool weather is perking me up a bit, and has me thinking about de-cluttering as well as working on little systems in our home to make things a little less chaotic, especially in the kitchen, which is at the front of the house and is the way we enter and exit.

As I've done a few times before, I thought I'd share a few of the easy things we do in our house to stay organized, and I hope YOU WILL SHARE YOURS WITH ME.

P.S. As we are still contemplating a kitchen renovation, any awesome ideas that have helped you in your kitchen are especially welcome.

Here are a few things that work for us:

Kitchen: 

A clipboard inside a cabinet with the grocery list on it. Anyone can add items when they realize we are running low. If someone says, "Could you buy gummies?" Always answer with, "Is it on the THE LIST?"

Where you enter from the garage, two Command hooks hang inside a kitchen cabinet, one for my husband's keys, one for mine.

When the kids were little, we kept a basket of socks in the kitchen, all white, and unisex. Because the kids put on their shoes downstairs before leaving the house, I never bothered storing socks in their bedrooms.

We have one drawer where all non-refrigerated snacks are kept, so there's no reason to go rummaging through spaghetti sauce or canned goods to get a snack.

 I keep a "current" folder in the kitchen with info about this season's sports teams,  class schedules, etc. I've had limited success with this system because it gets messy and disorganized as the papers pile up. Gah.

On the fridge we keep a magnetized pad of paper with the weekly dinner menu on it.

Laundry:

The kids'  artwork is on display from floor to ceiling in the laundry room, along with family photos, so I can see something cheery while I do laundry.

We have three beds in the house, and each has white sheets. It's annoying trying to guess which ones are queen and which king, so I took a black sharpie and wrote a big Q or a K on the tag to help me know which ones I'm folding. Also, I keep the K sheets in our bedroom, not the linen closet, so they don't get mixed up with the queens when I'm changing sheets.

I buy smaller bottles of detergent that fit inside my cabinets in my laundry room rather than one giant one that sits on the counter and gets drippy.

Bathroom:

A lazy susan is my favorite way to corral beauty products on a small counter.

I like to keep a travel toiletry bag stocked with necessities including toothbrush and razor so all I have to do is add makeup before going on a trip.

Leave extra grocery bags at the bottom of your trash can so you'll be ready with a new one when you empty the trash.

Closet:

If there is space, add an extra shelf above your closet shelf for out of season clothes or keepsakes.

Keep a bag on the floor of your closet to put donations in as soon as your realize a garment isn't working for you anymore.

Around the House:

Window seat: Under our kitchen window we have a window seat with a hinged lid. This is excellent built-in seating and makes great storage for our dog food, canned drinks, cleaning products, and potatoes! Except for when we forget about the potatoes and let them rot...

There are a lot of junk drawers in the house, and things do not always end up back where they should. However, several key items have definite homes: the metal tape measure, scissors, nail clippers, and the thermometer (which sits in a plastic basket labeled THERMOMETER) because when you are looking all over the house for these items, it can get a little...stressful. If you have ever seen your husband have an apparent toenail emergency, you know what I'm talking about.

Hooks everywhere help us deal with towels, purses, backpacks, bathrobes, and coats.

Garage:

If storage is tight in the house, consider having cabinets hung or buying a utility cabinet to store party supplies, platters, vases, and small appliances that don't fit in the kitchen.

The garage is also where we store our mops, brooms, and aprons using hooks and a special broom  hanger. I can just lean out the door and grab them.

We bought this little guy at Ikea more than 10 years ago for $1. Do they still have them? Perfect for keeping grocery bags in the garage for dog poop cleanup!

Car:

Bed, Bath and Beyond coupons stay in the car.

Returns stay in the car.

As soon as I have a bag full of donations, it goes into the car.

I also try to leave a snack for myself as well as a book or magazine in the car for waiting in school pickup lines.


Change it up. 

If a system isn't working, get rid of it. I've shared some ideas with you on the blog that have turned out to be bombs. Cute vintage traveling cases on the stairs so the kids would carry their own things up? Fail. Dish tubs with their names on them for the same purpose? Fail. We are back to stuff piling up directly on the stairs until I can't take it anymore.

The cute bar cart I rescued from the trash heap? Well, it didn't take me long to realize I wasn't Don Draper and didn't really need a bar cart. Now it's in the corner of the dining room with my daughter's school supplies on it.

Hmmm....maybe that could be a home for the binders?

What tips do YOU have to share? Help!

No Garage. No Mudroom. No Problem? Small Space Ideas.

So I may have told you we live in a 1960's split level with no garage and no mudroom. The specs from 1969 do exalt the praises of a "spacious mudroom on the lower level" which is the room I now use as an office. It was planned as a laundry room/mudroom, and it's a great size, but since it is in the back corner of the house, with no connection whatsoever to the driveway, carport or entrance to the house, it is not useful as a drop zone. So a blogger's paradise/laundry room it remains.

Even though we only have 2 kids, stuff seems to pile up around here. Tell me I'm not alone.


I thought I'd share some of my imperfect solutions to dealing with clutter. Not that all of my solutions ever last. Remember those cute vintage train cases I had on the stairs? Gone to greener pastures. They looked cute, but the junk just accumulated and no one felt like carrying it upstairs.

Now this is what I like to see when I think of home organization:

Isn't it purty? I have an entire idea file filled with images of gorgeous mudrooms for my dream house.

Alas, that is not the reality here.

We come from the carport directly into the kitchen eating area. We've made a mini-mudroom area just inside the door, which is usually a bit chaotic. The black organizer holds dog stuff in one drawer. Hats/mittens/scarves go in the next 2 (in the summer it's sunsreen and bug spray).

The lower ones are for the kids' shoes and socks. If you are going to have kids take off and put on shoes downstairs, why not cut out a step and keep all their socks right there, too? See, there's Jake putting his socks on.

I've added a metal shoe rack for Tom's shoes. I don't love it, but I hope it will keep things neater.

The hooks work well for us, but if they get overloaded, coats get in the way of the door. Ugh. Soooo, you'll see some secondary storage for the kids later on.

The top holds our phone, a bowl for keys, and paper and pencils for phone messages.

This mini-mudroom is great for the kids' stuff, but Tom and I need a place, too. You may wonder if we have a hall closet, which we do, but I find that even the grownups are...reluctant...to hang up coats in the closet each day, so I changed things a little bit in our foyer, which is next to the kitchen.

Here's a nice bookcase from Crate and Barrel. It has always held my collection of silver bowls and pitchers. I decided to take the silver out and replace it with some white baskets I had in basement.

The baskets now hold hats, gloves, and scarves for Tom and me. I hope this will work for us.

I also added 4 cute hooks from Anthropologie with our initials on them. Mere steps from the coat closet, I think these hooks will be good for my purse and whatever coat is in rotation that day.

Now doesn't my purse look happier here than in the kitchen?

The kids' hooks hold their sports' bags and scout stuff that is not needed every day.
Tom thought all of these hooks would lend an cluttered, junky air to the foyer, and they might. My thinking is that our foyer is generally wasted space. We have no key to the front door, so we never come in that way, leaving it just a weird, tiled pass-through. The house specs circa 1969 called it a "Grand Reception Room." Yeah, right.

Here's a closer look at those cute Anthropologie hooks.
Next is the coat closet. Inside the door is a shoe holder that has gotten lots of use. It used to hold my kids' craft supplies in our old house. For the past 5 years or so it has held hats, the camera, bug spray, flashlights, sports equipment and the very useful snowman kit (hat, coal, pipe, etc). While it is not lovely to look at, it has been handy.

Another nice addition to this small coat closet, and all the closets in our house, is an extra shelf up top. We noticed that all the closets had dead space up there, so we just added a cheap Closetmaid one from Home Depot. We needed this space because our coat closet also holds the vacuum, brooms, mops, and a tub full of rain/snow boots. I really like the holder that hangs the brooms on the walls.





Also in the foyer are these 2 huge vintage picnic baskets. One holds all of our Calvin and Hobbes books, the other about 5 extra rolls of paper towels. When I go to work, I use them to block the stairs so that Shadow doesn't wreck the family room.Talk about multi-purpose.

Heading upstairs you'll see the kids' hallway. It is a mini-gallery for their artwork and it has a row of hooks for hoodies and sweaters.

While I don't LOVE having our stuff "out in the open" all the time, I think the likelihood of people putting things back where they belong is greatly increased if we store things on hooks rather than in drawers and closets. Also, I always hope this strategy will help people find what they are looking for. A girl can dream, right?

I must admit I prefer summer when these hooks have beach towels, goggles and swim suits on them, but now that it's almost Thanksgiving, I think it's time to admit those days are gone for a while.

I hope you enjoyed this little tour. While a well-appointed mudroom would contain all of these things and more (drool! drool!) we've had to get a little creative around here. Organization and near-constant culling by Mom (do men ever go through the kids' clothes to see what has been outgrown?) help keep our junk from being completely overwhelming. Except for on the days that it is.

Just remember: Home is Where They Love You

Don't Judge a Book...

I am so sick of the library. I tried to be virtuous and get the kids plenty of books to read this summer. What did I get in return? Fines. Fines. Fines.

You would think I would have learned my lesson after my $18.75 in fines in July, but did I? No. I proceeded to check out 4 more books that are now late. One is AWOL, and I fear it could be in CT, Cleveland, PA, or all manner of places we don’t actually live. I scoured the minivan without success.

Did the kids actually read any of these books? No. Jake just finished the Harry Potter series, which we own, and is into “The 39 Clues,” a new series that is virtually impossible to get at the library. Plus it comes with little playing cards, so you'll want your own set. I am purchasing them one by one. Yep, there will be 39 books in all. That’s almost $400 by the time he’s finished. Somewhere a marketing genius is laughing at me. At least Jake's reading.

And Molly? Hasn’t found a series to spark her interest, which is why I keep going back to the library for yet more options. Aargh. Even Blockbuster seems more forgiving of this mom’s feeble attempts to keep it together this summer.

Tom’s response when I told him we had more fees? “Now that’s just irresponsible.” Thanks, dear.

In 10 years of libraries and story times and keeping the kids quiet and tracking our books, we have had to pay for 2 items. One, when TOM left a cassette tape (yes, we're showing our age) in a beach house tape player and two, when Molly barfed on Amelia Bedelia. If you ask me, I'm doing pretty well.

See if I try to stimulate your kids’ brains in the summer again. It’s TiVo from here on out.