House Organizing Week 3- Fridge

Well, I'm only in the 3rd week and I've already gotten off my schedule. After picking up my Bountiful Baskets order (a co-op for getting fresh fruits and veggies) I decided I could no longer stand how messy my fridge was. There were things in there that had been in their way long than they should have been, and having so much in there made it hard to remember exactly what I had in there. By cleaning it I now know exactly what I have so I can use it before it goes bad.
Before:

 After:

I'm so glad I did it! Nothing's better than having a sparkling clean fridge.

House Organizing Week 2- Bookshelves

Man has this week been an interesting week. Wednesday night I went into the bathroom to get ready for bed and I could hear water running. I knew that there wasn't anything in the house that would be making the water run.  Our house is 50 years old so I rushed to get my hubby to help me check the basement to make sure nothing was leaking. As we were both downstairs we turn off the water to the whole house but we could still hear the running water but luckily there was nothing wrong in the house. T decided to check outside. To our dismay there was a broken pipe right next to our house in the front yard, and the water was starting to get close to the window wells. I called my dad to see what we should do and he told us to turn off the water at the meter.

The meter! Now where in the world is it. We still have 4 or 5 inches of snow on our lawn. It took us at least 15 minutes to find it. We grabbed shovels frantically digging through the snow trying to find it. After finding it we tried to turn it off, but our little T for turning our sprinkler system off was not cutting it. Taylor tried using pliers and anything else we thought might help to get the thing to turn. After not getting in to budge for 15 min we waited for my dad to get there and hoped he had his big sprinkler T with him. Unluckily he didn't so after both my dad and T trying to get it moved for another 10 minutes we called the city emergency water dept. After another 10 minutes a guy showed up and with one quick turn he had the water off. Man were we re leaved.

I guess I should mention that this all started around 11:30 p.m. and that we didn't get the water off until almost 1 a.m. Luckily no water got in the house. T and my dad recovered the sprinkler pipes that were the location of the break in hopes that the huge pool of water wouldn't freeze and would drain during the night so that we could figure out exactly where the break was. After my dad left it took us both quite a while to settle down before we could even think of going to bed.

The next morning my dad came back over and he and T found the break. Somehow one of the pipes that needed to be turned off when we drained the sprinkler system in the fall didn't get turned off. It's an understandable mistake because there are so many random things that need to be done to our sprinkler system to turn it off. To give you an idea. There are probably 4 different updates to the original system, and some of the knobs no longer work so you have to use pliers to turn them off. Oh well, at least we were only without water for less than 12 hours, and we won't have to worry about fixing the break until it's warmer outside and we go to turn the sprinklers on.

On that happy note this is the project I decided to tackle. Our book cases! I'm not quite done, but I'm not exactly sure what I want to do to make it look more decorated. Someday I hope to build bookshelves that look built in, and hide the brick wall.

Before: I had big binders sitting up top that I was always afraid would fall on my head when I tried to get one down. We also had a bunch of my great uncles books on the shelves. I took those books downstairs and put on the bookcases downstairs, and I'll deal with them later.

After: All of the large binders and textbooks are on the bottom helping so it doesn't look off balence. I also moved some of the shelves around to make room for some of the books.

If anyone has any ideas on how to make this wall look better please let me know!

House Organizing Week 1- Desk

Since I only decided to do my organizing resolution I just decided to clean off the top of my desk this week. A lot of the drawers are already organized or left completely empty. I love this desk, the lines, the curves, the handles, and it's sturdiness. Someday I hope to refinish it, but for right now it's perfect for holding my laptop.

Here are my before pictures. I couldn't even put my laptop on it.

Now I can finally sit and work at my laptop again! It feels so good to have a clean place to work at again.

New Kitchen Floor

As the title says we have a new kitchen floor. The flooring has been sitting in our house since last June just waiting to be put it. It's nice to finally have it installed, and man does it update our kitchen.

This is what it looked like before we painted the kitchen in the beginning of November of last year. Including my Great Aunt's curtains. At this point we had replaced their table with something that fits us, as well as the big ugly brass knobs on the cabinets. I wish I would have taken pictures before the knobs so you can see how big of a difference just changing knobs can be

This is the in between stage. We have the painting done. Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture before we started pulling the carpet up. Underneath the carpet and linoleum we found an older linoleum which we believe runs under the carpet in the living room as well. That's the rock looking linoleum 2 pictures down

The newer linoleum had been put on top of a sheet of plywood. Half of the cabinets where also on top of the new linoleum so we had to cut it out from around some of the cabinets since we weren't planning on pulling cabinets out. My dad and brother were kind enough to help us. My brother was at our house 17 hours the working on it with us the day we did it.

Before putting the table back and cleaning up all of the tools off the counter.

This is what it looks like now after painting the walls and ceiling, and putting in the new flooring. I love it so much more now. 

It's wonderful having the kitchen finally feel like it's our's. In the last picture you can see the pot rack my MIL gave me for Christmas. It freed up a whole cupboard, which is definitely needed in this little space. And the continuous floor makes the room seem much bigger!

Happy 2011

It seems like every year I have the same resolutions. One of these is being more organized. I love having things organized, and can't stand clutter. Yet somehow the clutter wins. Growing up the problem was that I had to much stuff I was trying to keep/fit in my room. Now that I have a 4 bedroom house you would think I'd have more space than I know what to do with. The problem is that we moved into an already full house, well at least a half full house. My Great Uncle left a lot of stuff in the house when he moved to a retirement home. My family spent a lot of time getting most of the upstairs cleaned out leaving only the furniture left. The basement is another story. There are still two rooms that we haven't even touched downstairs.

I know I can't blame everything on the stuff that was already in the house. I brought a lot of stuff as well. Now that I've lived in the house for more than a year I have more of a sense of where I think things should belong...so this year I'm going to organize my entire house and gather like things to one place instead of being spread through the whole house.

In order to accomplish this overwhelming task I've decided to tackle one room a month (for small rooms there may be more than one a month). Within each month I will have one area of the room to focus on.
January- Media/Computer Room
-Desks
-Closets
-Cabinets
-Bookshelves
February-Sewing Room
-Drawers/Shelves
-Closet
-Material
-Laundry Room Cabinets
March-Living Room
-Games/Uncle's left over books
-Music Books
-Records
-Hall drawer
April-Kitchen
-Under sink
-Dishes cabinets
-Seasonings cabinets
-Fridge
May- Upstairs Bedrooms
-Master closet
-Master dressers
-Spare Closet
-Spare Room everything else
June- Sunroom/Shed/Patio
-Sunroom
-Shed
-Shed
-Patio
July- Spare Room/Family Room
-Spare Closet/rest of room
-Old toys
- School boxes
-Any other boxes
August- Food Storage Room
-Inventory
-Get rid of anything that's no longer good
-Get rid of uncle's stuff left
-Make room for canning food
September- Shop
-need dad and brother's help
October- Storage Room
-South Wall
-East Wall
-Middle
-West Wall
November- Hallway/Bath
-Bookshelves
-Cupboards
-Bath closet
-Christmas decorations
December-
Anything that's been missed, but hopefully just enjoy the Holidays


I know this is a big undertaking, and there are different circumstances that will effect the order that I do the different rooms, such as when my brother is able to find a new house so he can take the table that's in the sunroom and his tools from the basement.


I'm excited to take on this undertaking and will share my accomplishments each week on Saturdays. May this year be the best year ever.