52 Weeks of Organizing- Week 10

This week I didn't feel so much into documenting the "before and after" of my organizing. Partially because I was relying on my iPhone for pictures and partially because I was jumping around between lots of spaces and small projects. There wouldn't even be much "before and after" impact but I can tell how all the little things in the house are adding up to a more organized space overall.

Containerizing seemed to be a big theme for me this week!

From the top left:

First row: Black 12 x 12 box that now contains all larger than 8 x 10 paperwork. White photo box containing all things related to glue/tape/stickiness and an empty Oreo box waiting to be decorated and filled.
Cereal boxes turned magazine files waiting to be decorated. Extra magazines below and between the boxes.
Binders with some of our DVDs (will show this project when its complete!). Two photo boxes containing sewing essentials.
Second row: Under the bed containers with unfinished quilt/sewing items and wrapping paper/bags/contact paper/tissue paper, a mini wrapping station of sorts.
A plastic 12 x 12 scrapbook container now holds all my tea light candles and melting scents. Ignore the other stuff!
Two baskets full of candies and goodies. I even organized those into separate baggies which I'll show another time.
Bottom row: Soup in a cupboard all stacked nicely. This cupboard was filled mostly with the candy that is now in baskets and a couple pretty much empty bags of tortilla chips- yeesh!
A clean and organized freezer.

Nothing big and "wow what a transformation" to show but lots of little steps in the right direction!

Don't forget to check out everyone else's week 10 over at Organizing Junkie!

52 Weeks of Organizing- Week 9

So, in case I didn't already know enough how badly I needed this organizing challenge, my inability to find my camera battery charger is a definite sign! I can't even begin to imagine which box it would be in. I think the preggers brain is finally kicking in. I'm usually one of those people who knows where things are even when they don't know where it is (does that make sense???) 

I haven't finished any major project this week. We picked up a few more containers at some really great prices which I'll be utilizing this week. I started organizing my current magazines but am stalled by the fact that the fabric to finish the magazine holders I've made is in the garage and there is about 8 billion feet of snow between me and that garage. 

It's been weeks upon weeks of -25 C (-13 F) and lower weather. With nearly constant snow. Ot's getting to me. 

On the bright side I've been on some sort of maniac scrapbooking kick. One of my 101 list items is to scrapbook all the pictures I have printed out. I would like to take a guess that I've done maybe 200 pages since Monday. I'm kind of excited to count them when its over and see. Granted I'm only putting the pictures on the page- no titles or journaling- but I still feel mega productive when I look at the pile of pages I've created. 

My "good enough" is currently just "better than it was before". However, the longer I do this challenge the more I'm finding my standards of "good enough" are changing. For the better of course. 

My parents came over this week and even though hubby and I feel that our house is a relative disaster zone we received a ton of compliments for how good it looked. My dad even used the word "organized" to describe our house!!! That was pretty great. They've lived through my years of tornado like messes (which I totally get from my dad!) so really any change seems much better. I definitely was lacking in the organizing/cleaning motivation this week but I'm really disliking the messy state my house gets in when I don't keep on top of it. 

I now make the bed every day which I can safely say that is a phenomenon that rarely occurred in my childhood bedroom, unless my mom did it for me. After seeing the made bed (we currently have no bedroom door) my mom said "You should have babies more often." 

When I manage to find my battery charger, or borrow my mothers, I'll show some progress pictures.

52 Weeks of Organizing- Week 8

Laura's Challenge this week was to keep flat surfaces clear. Guess what I did on Saturday night??? And in my case I decided that keeping them 90% clear was good enough. At least they are not just piles of stuff now, right?

Be sure to go check out all the other great progress people across the blog world are making in the 52 Week Challenge!

52 Weeks of Organizing- Week 7

I was able to complete two smaller projects this week.

The first one was the second of the 3 drawers in our kitchen. Yes only 3 drawers in the entire kitchen. Actually, the entire house as there are no drawers in our bathroom either. No junk drawers for this girl!!!
Except that this drawer became the "kitchen junk" drawer. Everything from Ziplocs to wooden spoons to oven mitts and fondue forks was just getting shoved in the drawer.

I also see a cheese grater, rolling pin, measuring cups, funnel, Kitchen Aid attachments. Oh my!

After a bit of purging, sorting and relocation of a few items my drawer now looks like this:

Ahhhh so much better. You can't see the over mitts tucked between the front of the drawer and the baskets or the rolling pin behind the basket of large utensils but they are there. 

The smaller basket in the front is for baking items including measuring cups/spoons and my cookie scoop. The smaller basket in the back is a mishmash of utensils and our extra can opener. We did have three due to moving and misplacing our good one twice but I got rid of that! 

Surprisingly, my husband did one of this week's organizing project without any suggestions or prompting from me! We have been meaning to put up our shoe rack by our backdoor for a while now (read: three months) but kept putting it off.

I came into the kitchen and saw he had pulled all the shoes out of the backdoor area, was vacuuming and had the shoe rack ready to be assembled. Of course I jumped in and helped him out!

It only took us about 15 minutes to complete this little project but the results have been wonderful. No more tripping over shoes every time we come in the door. No more snow ending up inside of shoes because they were piled up on each other. The backdoor area looks just that much better. It's not perfect and there is a lot more we want to do but it is one small step and better than it was.

We have more shoes. In a box somewhere in the garage!

 Since it's winter we really only need our boots right now. 

My new motto in this organizing journey --> "It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better!"

Here's to a successful week 8!!!!

52 Weeks of Organizing- Week 6

This week I managed to work on bits and pieces of a few projects and finished one!

During week 4 I started sorting my mail and the various piles of paper I had throughout the house.
This was just the "mail bin" that was accumulating any and all papers that entered the house in the last 3 months. There were some other piles but I didn't take any photos of those.

They are finally all contained in a nice file box.

I am not quite done with all our of paperwork as I am waiting to buy a few boxes to help with the storage but I feel that this is a good start!

I also worked on DVD storage, filling and organizing our new entertainment unit (!!!) and a few spots in the kitchen. None of those are completely done but when they are I'll post them here!

52 Weeks of Organizing- Week 5

Laura's post this morning had some great questions that really got me thinking about the organizing that I've done in this last 5 weeks.


1.  Name ONE reason you want to get organized.  It will be neat to see the variety of answers.
For me it's become the sense of calm that organizing our space has brought me. Life for the past 5 years has felt like constant chaos. Being in full time university, working, volunteering, student teaching, and planning our wedding means life was never very simple or calm. Getting rid of clutter and utilizing our small space more effectively has allowed me to regain that sense of calm. I want this calm feeling to stay with us as we transition into being new parents this summer and I know that continuing to organize and maintaining this new way of living will achieve that.


2.  What did you organize last week & were you happy with the way it turned out?



I did a very quick "front of fridge makeover" last night. 

Before: 

A very messy and cluttered fridge.

After:

A neat, organized and calm fridge.

I am most proud of this little space on our fridge. 

Our city gives us a 12 month garbage/recycling schedule.

You can see in the before picture that it is big and took up a lot of space. 

Once a month is done having it still on the fridge seemed pointless. 

I cut out the individual months and stacked them under the magnet. 

Now when each month is over I can recycle them! 

It also takes up about 1/16 of the space it did before. 

All the extra magnets went into a basket in the cupboard or on the side of the fridge.

3.  Have you had any breakthroughs or a-ha moments yet?  I would love to hear them!

My biggest a-ha moment has been realizing that maintaining the organized spaces is just as important as organizing it in the first place! I've been able to keep all the spaces I've organized in the last 5 weeks looking the same as they did the moment after they were done! 

Don't forget to check out all the other great projects from this week over at Org Junkie!

Organizing Update

I am still unable to get pictures uploaded from my camera. Hubs is going to take a look for the cord out in the garage tonight.

I've been keeping up with the 52 Weeks of Organizing Challenge and have completed two more projects.

I made a space for towels in my kitchen as opposed to them being stored in the bedroom like before.

Our mail/paper work is in the process of being sorted and filed and made to look as beautiful as bills can be made to look.

Under the kitchen sink is now another one of those places I love to look at just because it is clean, containerized and organized!

The new entertainment unit is taking a bit more time that originally anticipated. They are almost two-thirds done so hopefully in the next week or two it will be moved into the house.

I will do the before/after posts when I get pictures!

In the meantime I'll be madly clicking through posts over at "IHeart Organizing". Jen's blog is full of amazing organization information, ideas and inspiration. I definitely heart it!

52 Weeks of Organization Week 2

Before starting this project I thought it would take me a lot longer than it actually did.
I thought I had more stickers than I actually do which is a good thing. It was still hard to find them all when they are just thrown in a drawer.

At "Crafts and Crap" Michelle shared how she organized her stickers. I really liked the idea but went with a much more scaled down version. I didn't create individual sections but did have three categories of alphabets, words and everything else. The amount of stickers I have just didn't warrant separate sections. 

The drawer full of stickers aka "the before". 

When I reorganized my craft room on New Year's Eve I ended up just dumping all my stickers and embellishment type items into this drawer. I knew at the time it was probably not the most reasonable solution but at least they weren't in the popsicle box anymore. 

Sorting into piles

After sorting there were some stickers I realize I've had since my Jr High scrapbooking days. I kept thinking they looked like stickers a 13 year old would use which makes sense because I was 13 when I bought them!!! There is no way I'm going to use them now so they went into my "giveaway/donate" box. 

In the binder and ready to go!

I used scotch tape to keep the stickers on pieces of printer paper and then put the papers back to back into page protectors. I bought a pack of a hundred page protectors from Costco for student teaching and recipes. I love page protectors and use them whenever I can. I used to put my study notes into them, it somehow made them feel more important and like they really deserved my attention. 

It is going to be so much easier to actually use my stickers now which will help me achieve my goal of scrapbooking all the pictures I have printed out as well as using up a good percentage of my supplies. 

And there is plenty of room left inside the binder for more stickers in the future!

It only took me two episodes of "Drop Dead Diva" on Netflix (did you know we get streaming Netflix in Canada now??? Of course we have a crappy selection of shows compared to the States but its getting increasingly better all the time! Of course this may only be exciting to me...Oh oh oh and it was announced that Target is coming to Canada in 2012/2013! Excitement! ) from start to finish. A nice, quick organizing project for a Thursday night! 

Now to decide on my project for week 3...

Reusable Containers- After

I'm so sick of snow and cold. This morning with the windchill it was -29 C/ - 20 F. Friday is supposed to be -39 C/-38 F with the windchill. I was planning on going to the school I volunteer at but since I have to bus it across the city with like 4 transfers that is SO NOT happening! I am completely happy to just stay in my warm cozy house under a lot of blankets!

I finished sorting and organizing the reusable containers today. I found some great colourful baskets at the dollar store and four of them fit great on the shelf. Each basket contains a different brand of containers with one of the back ones also containing a couple Bento boxes and cereal containers. Now I just have to pull the basket out and take it to the counter when packing up food.

Reminder of the before:

Containers everywhere!

And the after:

You can see in the first two pictures that the rest of the cupboard is still a disaster but just avert your eyes and pretend you didn't see that... One step at a time! 

My week one of the 52 Week Organizing Challenge is officially done and it is only halfway through week 2! Alright! 

For my week two project I'm going to organize all my stickers. I have a container full and never use them because I can never find what I'm looking for! More on that later... 

Hope your week one of the challenge has gone well :) 

52 Weeks of Organizing

Laura at "I'm an Organizing Junkie" has started a 52 Weeks of Organizing challenge. Since getting organized is part of my 101 list and something I feel I am ALWAYS working on I decided to join in. 

The idea is to have 52 small projects you can do each week of 2011 to help get organized. Goal setting is more successful if you break your goals down into smaller and manageable steps. Organize the cutlery drawer is a small step to having an organized kitchen and feels a whole lot more obtainable than "organize entire kitchen by Saturday"!

For the first week Laura has some questions to answer so here we go!

1.  Do you have your list written? (if you missed it, you can find the pdf here)

I'm working on the list as I want to try and align it with my 101 list it's going to take me a while to figure out!

2.  What is the first thing on it that you hope to accomplish this week?

I am going to organize my reusable containers.

3.  How are you going to make it happen?

I plan to sort the containers into all the different brands/types I have, get rid of extra lids/containers, get larger containers to group them into and for easier access from the cupboard. Most of all I'm going to KEEP them organized afterwards!


This photo is extremely embarrassing but it is the current state of the back cupboard in my kitchen. I got a little ambitious and decided to reorganize it entirely yet clearly did not finish! So at the moment there are reusable containers all over the cupboard and probably other places in the kitchen as well. 

After pictures are coming once I can get to the Dollar Store to get some containers! I'm really hoping the roads are better tonight.

*Edit* you can see the completed project here!

Productive Day!

Even though I'm still very much in lazy vacation mode I feel like I accomplished a lot today.
I'm nearly finished organizing my craft room. I still have some boxes to bring in from the garage but everything that is currently in the house in that room is organized. I will post some (embarrassing) before and after pictures soon.


My iPhone is now organized, I went down from three pages of barely used folders of apps to a single page and only 6 folders! (#86 on the list)

My Google Reader is minus a few blogs that I either never read or are never updated. I also either read or "marked as read" all the unread posts. I was at nearly 300 unread items. Yikes! (#69 on the list)

We've decided that January will be our 30 days of no eating out, #80 on the list. Of course I'm hoping that we will cut down on eating out even after these 30 days but for now I'm just focusing on 30 days of home cooking. Tonight was day number 1. Our cupboards are a little bare so our meal was nothing spectacular but tomorrow we are going grocery shopping and I have some great meals planned! 

I also made chocolate chip cookie dough to be baked tomorrow, of course we had to eat some tonight! 

The lovely mixer I used wedding gift cards to purchase. I feel like I have a grown up kitchen now :)

So today was a day of lots of ACTION! Woohoo! Hope yours was productive as well. If you are heading back to work tomorrow, I will think of you as I sleep in til 11 am. 

PS. Now that I am done student teaching I've decided to blog with my real first name. Em is just the first letters of my two last names. Just thought I would let my 3 readers know that so they aren't too confused!