House Organizing- Sewing Room

I have read in many places that one way to help you get motivated to organize you should have a friend help. My house has a lot of work that needs to be done, and I didn't feel comfortable bothering a friend, so I decided to ask my niece instead. Usually when I ask her to help me clean for pay she doesn't want to do it. This time I started by agreeing to give her one of my of toys in exchange for helping me go through my old toys. Amazingly she jumped at the opportunity. As we were working I asked her if she would come and help me one day a week every week until school starts. She agreed because she liked the one on one time she gets with me, (plus the monetary benefits). When returning her home her younger sister asked if she could come too, so now I have two afternoons a week where I will have one of my nieces to help me.

Last week niece 1 helped me go through my old toys and separate them into boxes to get ready for a garage sale. This week she helped me rearrange my sewing room. Even though she doesn't know exactly what to do, having someone there to talk to helps me stay on task and not get to bored.

We put boxes of fabric that were stacked haphazardly behind the door in the closest, and moved the bookshelf and one set of drawers behind the door. Now I have room where the shelves used to be to put the desk I refinished.

I won't go into depth about everything else I did to reorganize, but ever drawer got pulled out, and similar things got put together. There is no longer spools of thread in 10 different places, or beads in 3 different drawers. It's nice to have everything organized and know where it all is. I am also working on organizing all my papers in the binders on the shelves. Soon they will all be white and labeled to make it easier to find things.

Before, such a mess

After:
I moved the drawers that were under the table behind the door. I moved fabric around and got more in the drawers under the table and put some in the black boxes.

The little drawers hold thread, sewing machine supplies, serger suplies, pins, needles, and all the different cutting supplies that I have.

I got the magnet board, magnetic containers, bar and cups at Ikea. The hold scrap booking supplies, pens, markers, and paper scissors. All of my 8 1/2 x 11 paper is in the drawers as well as stamps, stickers, things to be scrap booked, and embellishments. My big paper won't fit in the drawers so it's in the plastic box to the left of my desk.

This is the area that is behind the door. The drawers hold beads, patterns, serger thread, lace tools, and fabric for projects that are half way done.

Here's just a fun picture of my sewing books.

It's nice having my sewing room all organized. I do need to get more drawers and organize the rest of my fabric, as well as organizing the closet. I also want to at some point put shelves on the walls above my desk to hold my paper cutter and spiral binder. I also found a pegboard in my basement that I'm going to paint and hang on the wall so I can hang my thread and other things on it. Someday I would also like to get rid of the green shag carpet, and get a carpet that pins and needles can't hide in as easily.

I love having an area for my sewing!

House Organizing Week 5- Game Closet

Today I tackled our game closet. It is in our living room, next to where I teach my violin lessons, so I store my my music things in the closet as well. This last weekend my mother-in-law gave us a bunch of the families old board games. As you can see there wasn't any space to put any of the new games. It had been way to long since I organized anything in it.

This is what It looks like now...so much better!

The top shelf holds a bunch of bigger music books, mostly ones that belonged to my great aunt and uncle. I also placed all of our musical instruments on the top two shelves to the right.

In the middle section are our games. It's wonderful to have so many games to choose from. I also put my stereo under the main control box that controls our hidden speakers in the living room.

Here are all of the books that my students are currently using, so that I can prepare for lessons. Also I keep notebooks here to keep track of what my students are studying.

The bottom shelves hold all of my great uncles records, as well as more of his music books. I placed all of my piano books on the shelves as well. With so many of my great uncle's records still in the closet there isn't enough room to put all of my violin books so they are organized in the plastic containers.

There were already cd holders on the wall of the closet so I place all of our music cds in them. For our wedding we got the pink photo box. I never knew what to do with it, but now it holds all of my flashcards I use for teaching as well as my husband's oboe reeds and other small things need for my lessons.

Even though I get half way through and just don't feel like going any farther it feels so wonderful when an area is all organized. Now on to the next project, what will it be...

House Organizing Week 4- Laundry Room

I know that I haven't done any organizing in a couple of months, but the spring has got me motivated to keep working on my New Years Resolution. This week I've been working on completely redoing my laundry room, so I figured I might as well reorganize everything when I put it all back together.

I reorganized the first cabinet so all towels and sheets that my great uncle might need in the future are on the top shelf. The middle shelve has rags on the left and tubs on the right is a tube full of toilet paper rolls that I'm saving for a project (you can see them in the unorganized picture on the bottom shelf). This cabinet is right above the washing machine, so I put all the detergents, bleach, and stain removers within easy reach on the bottom shelf.

The middle cabinet has empty room in it now. I went through and organized all my cleaning products and through away empty bottles. All of my home cleaners go in this cabinet to keep them in one place and out of easy reach from children.  The bucket did get put back on the top shelf after the picture was taken. On the middle shelf are all the paint samples that I tried for our house.

Before I decided to take before pictures I partially cleaned out the last cabinet. The only thing I took out before hand was a bunch of blankets and towels. This cabinet is over the dryer, so naturally the dryer sheets went on the bottom shelf. Before cleaning out the cabinet I had an empty dryer sheet box, as well as a box that I never used because I didn't like the smell. The empty box went to the garbage, and the unused box is going to a friend that will use it. Blankets and unused sheets are now folded and piled nicely on the top shelf. New Towels now have a clean shelf to sit on until I decide where to use them.

It is so nice to have organized cabinets that I know exactly what's in them. There is extra room which I'm sure won't last for long, but It will stay organized!

House Organizing back next week

Well, I kept my New Years Resolution for 3 weeks. That's an all time high. I'm going to make up for the last two weeks next week. Then I'll be back on schedule.

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!