organization junky
Not to say that my house is the epitome of cleanliness and organization, but I have always craved and strived to have an organized home. As a child I was drawn to containers/boxes/bins/any item used to store other items. Smitten was I with colorful hat boxes, and my mom picked up on this early on and would put many of my birthday/Christmas gifts in them. I still have many of those boxes that I use for organizing my craft stuff. If you look in most of the drawers around our house, you’ll find mini bins to arrange the contents. Having piles of mail and papers or other daily junk on my counters drives me insane, so I put together our mail center in hopes of cutting down on the counter clutter. It works to an extent, but I do have to weed out the junk mail first so as not to overstuff the bins. Mike hasn’t quite caught onto my mail system and will usually leave all his daily junk on my counters. He gets mad at me when he can’t find his stuff (I usually throw his stuff in his allotted bin each day), but it’s always in the place where I’ve designated for him to put that debris. During the school year Annie and Mimi’s daily papers pile up very quickly. At first I tried to be the good mother and save everything, but 5+ papers a day for 180 days just takes up way too much space. Now I try to filter out the significant or cute stuff that shows their progress. I got a hanging file bin for each girl which has a folder for each age. I put all the school papers in there and hope to hand it off to the girls when they start their own families.
When we moved to Maryland and had an extra room for the girls to use as a playroom I went on an organizing hunt and decided to purchase a cubby unit from Ikea and bins to go in each cubby. Initially, I tried to organize each bin by different types of toys, but the girls weren’t able to understand the concept of organizing. I was just happy that all the toys made it into the bins during clean-up time. Upon moving here we decided to make half of the guest bedroom a playroom for the girls still using our cubby/bin system. However, it seemed to have gotten out of hand the past months as the girls acquired more toys and tried to stuff every single toy into those bins. I decided it was high time to make labels for the bins (Annie can now read well enough) with pictures and to sift out the junk that wasn’t needed/used anymore. I finally got around to accomplishing this goal of making and installing the labels. Even the girls are excited about this project and have been great users of the system. I really hope it lasts because it helps take away some of the anxiety I feel when some part of my house is not organized.
The labels I made have the descriptive term and picture. I even tried to make them cute with ribbons.
I also made labels for all of the kitchen toys. The girls especially love these and seem to play with their kitchen more often now.
In the past the girls would just stuff all their princess dresses in the bins which took up too much space. Since the closet isn’t really used for anything other than storing a few things, it made since to hang the dresses in there. I bought those 3M hooks for this purpose. Yes, the chalkboard also resides in the closet. Surprisingly, it all fits and is not too cluttered for the girls.
Now I can breath easier. That’s saying a lot because I’ve got about 1/3 of my lung capacity these days.
The girls love to help cook. They helped Daddy make cheesy, scrambled eggs one Saturday morning.
