5 x 5 challenge…the final week

I’m with Stef, I’m not sure this should stop…it really needs to become a “lifestyle change” for me, so that I actually keep up on things around the house!  Last week was my week to FINISH all the projects I started…and I waited to long to post so I have no idea what day I did these, but here is the list of to do’s that got checked off:

* Tuesday the kids and I made a trip to Kearney –a Target run for diapers turned into 4 stops and a whole lot of money spent….but I picked up all the things we’ve been needing to finish projects around here.  Makenzie found butterflies to hang above her bed (much cheaper than the $50 picture she’s had her eye on, BUT she picked a pink one and a blue one much to her mother’s dismay…I thought 2 pink or a pink and orange to match the rest of the room…. she informed me that blue is her favorite color and she needed a blue one). And I’m slowly learning to pick my battles with that girl!  We also got picture frames to hang in the nursery, a wall hanging for the master bedroom (no more empty walls!), lamp shade for the guest bedroom (goodbye light green shade that came from Makenzie’s nursery and matched NOTHING in the guest bedroom), a lamp for the nursery, new picture frames for the living room and a heater for the basement (so more freezing to death at night!)  The kids were amazingly good shoppers too – extra bonus! 

* Clean out the flour cupboard…I started this project in Week 1 with ordering new canisters. This week I got them out of the box, washed them and put them in the cupboard…and cleaned out the old ones, washed those and they’re in the goodwill pile! Cleaning out that cupboard might need to become a more regular project….it was seriously disgusting! I honestly don’t know how I spill so much in the cupboard!

* Ordered pictures to fill the new frames in the living room and our bedroom.

* Ordered vinyl lettering (like uppercase living) for our bedroom –as soon as this gets here and gets put up our room can officially be considered DONE! 

* 2011 Shutterfly photobook…..this was WAY more than a 15 minute task (like 8 hours more), but I am SO glad to have it nearly done!  Tom had National Guard drill this weekend which meant I was home with kiddos all weekend, so as soon as they were down for naps or in bed for the night, I was plugging away on Shutterfly.  The finished project-  a 99 page 12x12 photobook of everything we did in 2011.  I started doing these when Makenzie was born and I LOVE THEM!  I have a few things to finish up before I can print this one, but after staying up till midnight Friday and Saturday night, working through the Super Bowl and finishing the last 7 pages last night, its nearly done!

I have a few projects I still want to finish – the biggest one: deciding what to do with all the pictures I didn’t put in the photobook.  I’m leaning towards continuing to print all these and put them in albums –but that requires editing and labeling them all (shutterfly will print captions on the back if you take the time to type them in…and my camera automatically dates everything so the date shows up on the back of the picture automatically….how nice is that!)  And in case you’re wondering – yes I’m addicted to shutterfly!

5 x 5 organizing challenge

Thank you Stef, for getting me hooked on this!   I read Stef’s blog in the midst of flipping our house and making New Year’s resolutions, and I thought it was the perfect time to get started!  The idea is to do 5 organizing tasks (i.e. 15 minute tasks that will make your life easier/more organized) per week for 5 weeks.  In case you wanted to know….here are the tasks from last week:

1.)  Finish setting up the guest bedroom.  Part of the “flip” was switching our room upstairs with the guest bedroom downstairs.  We hired movers for this part….they were coming to move a piano anyway, and for $45 they agreed to move all the furniture.  Hallelujah!  Sunday I adjusted all the furniture to the places I wanted it to go, set up all the decorations/photo albums and other miscellaneous stuff that gets stored in the guest bedroom, and put everything in the closet that goes in the closet.  This was way more than a 15 minute project, and I could have broken it down into several days, but both kiddos took a long nap and I actually enjoyed just getting it all done!  Someday you’ll get an “after” picture, but right now the bed is covered in stuff that goes to Texas, so a picture has to wait!

2.)  Organize my recipe book cupboard.  This cupboard had gotten totally out of control –I have a tendency to print off a recipe and throw it in the cupboard until all of a sudden every time I opened the cupboard I literally needed to duck and run because something was going to fall out.  During nap time Tuesday, I gathered up all the lose papers and tucked them into a 3 ring binder, separated by type of recipe, so now I actually have a chance at finding what I’m looking for and there’s no risk of a concussion when you open the door. 

3.)  Take stuff to Goodwill.  This was also a Tuesday project….the new nursery was completely overrun with all the junk I cleaned out of all the closets, so Monday night I quick finished cleaning out my closet and Tuesday morning I loaded the back end and entire passenger front seat with crap and hauled it all to Goodwill.  We have 3 big things that still need to go, but it requires more muscles than I have and Tom’s pickup, so it has to wait for another day…hopefully this week!

4.)  Get the stocking hat and mitten problem under control.  Our coat closet was another disastrous area.  It started out organized with a small tub for hats, gloves, etc….then we outgrew the tub, so I added a second one and separated them into kids and adults….then we outgrew that and things just got thrown on top of the two tubs until it was driving me crazy.  To make it easy, I just separated the kids’ stuff into boys and girls and got them each their own basket…..easy fix, we already had the baskets on hand, it looks SO much better, and they can find their mittens without help from mom! 

5.) Clean out the car.  Not deep cleaning – that’s way more than a 15 minute project, just clean out all the cubbies and trash so we were ready to trade it in.  The kids actually had fun “helping” me on Saturday morning – I put them to work cleaning out the seat pockets by their carseats and I cleaned out all the compartments in the front.  We put everything in a big tote so we could move it easily to the new van when we got it. 

6.)  Make a list of everything that needs to go to Texas with us.  Yes, I’m addicted to lists, and no this didn’t really get my house organized, but it lowered my stress level so I think it counts!

And here are the tasks from this week:  (Note to self, 5  tasks in 5 days is TOO much….thankful that most weeks I’ll have 7 days to get these done!!) 

1.) Pack travel bags for the kids….with a 12+ hour trip in the car, I’ve picked up lots of little surprises for the kiddos for the road, so Sunday I packed each kiddo their own little bag of toys, books, crayons etc for the trip (oh yeah, and dvds since we have a dvd player in the new van!).

2.) Put stuff away in the new van. New van purchased Monday night, everything reloaded on Tuesday morning.

2.) Picked out canisters and ordered them (thank you amazon free shipping!)…..next on the list, cleaning out the flour/sugar cupboard! As nerdy as it may sound, I seriously can’t wait for this! We got canisters as a wedding gift and I’ve literally hated them since we got them –they are too small to hold an entire bag of flour/sugar etc which means I constantly have a bag of flour and a canister of flour in the cupboard, and they’re so skinny its impossible to get a measuring cup in the canister to fill it.

3.) Haul all the junk to the trash that has been sitting in the nursery for two weeks.  I was hoping to get the rest of the stuff to goodwill, but didn’t happen….not something this 6 month pregnant lady can do on her own, it requires hubby’s pickup + hubby’s muscles to load/unload.  I did manage to at least get everything to the garage so the house looks showable (see #5)!  

4.) Finish moving books out of the living room to the new toy room/office.

5.)  Frantically pick up the house because the realtor called Thursday and wants to show the house next week…..seriously, our house is not even listed and just this week, we took down our for sale by owner sign and decided we weren’t even going to try to sell right now.  We’re still probably 18 months from having a finished house to move to, and 3 months from having a baby, and we just flipped the whole house….BUT I can’t resist the prospect of selling, so I spent naptime Friday trying to get this place ready to show! 

And now you know, I’m a dork because I’m blogging about all the crazy things I’m doing to organize my house.   No organizing this week – just hanging out with the family and enjoying 10 days without work! 

Dilemma….

With Baby #3 on the way, we have a HUGE problem at our house.  I think I mentioned in my last blog….we have 2 bedrooms on the main floor of the house and the new house won’t be built for AT LEAST a year (I’m banking on it being closer to 18 months or 2 years…..but that’s another story).  Anyway, the bottom line is we’re stuck with the house we have now and we’re just going to have to make it work.  The solution: move everyone to the basement where we have 3 rooms that can be used as bedrooms.  I’ve decided to put Makenzie and Micah in the biggest room in the basement so that we have more room for toys in their bedroom (which will hopefully translate to less toys all over the rest of the house).  We have a set of old bunk beds that I’m going to paint black – and leave as 2 separate twin beds….no bunks yet!

So here’s the dilemma:  how do I decorate their room???  I’m trying to come up with semi-coordinating bedding that will look good together now but that I love enough to want to keep when we have a new house and they have their own rooms…..so far I’ve looked at no less than 50 websites and found NOTHING.  I take that back, I found one set…pink polka dots for Makenzie, blue polka dots for Micah….but I wasn’t thrilled with it. 

Today I started thinking about maybe just trying to find bedding for each of them that has one common color – maybe a green or brown….something that I can use for curtains and paint, and just not worry about the bedding matching or even coordinating for that matter. 

Any suggestions, comments, good ideas, etc are welcome – ready?? Go!