April

I cannot believe that April is over tomorrow! This month has seriously flown by. We have had sooo much going on, here's some of the highlights:

EMR:
We switched over to Electronic Medical Records (EMR) at work. I had tons of meetings getting ready for it, and the past 3 weeks I have clocked lots of overtime. It really is a pretty good system, but transition for anything is difficult. I just keep listing the positive things in my mind and it really helps keep my attitude in check :). I will say that this week (the third week) has already been 1000 times better b/c we all just keep getting better and better at using the system. It definitely has been a major change for my brain since I look at/use a computer all day long now.

New Furniture:
Nothing too major, but we added another bookcase in our master bedroom and also got a new nightstand for one of our guest bedrooms. We got both at ikea, and I spent a Saturday morning having a lot of fun putting them together. I love the look of the new nightstand because its less obtrusive, and there is now room for a chair in that room. As to why we got another bookcase, it obviously made perfect sense to us to just buy another bookcase to hold all our books instead of just getting rid of some. haha. I may or may not have a slight book obsession.

Visitors!

We had lots of visitors this month which I love! 

First, Garrett came and spent 3 days with us since his mom had her thyroid ablated and was in strict isolation for 3 days. Sadly, he came the first week of switching over to EMR (yikes!) and I was only able to take off one day that week, but thankfully my sister was able to skip a couple of classes and come watch him 2 of the days while me and Michael were at work. He was a great visitor and really bonded with the pup while he was here. We were pretty sad when he left because all of a sudden our house felt so quiet with him gone! 

Our second set of visitors was Lisa, Josh and their 2 girls. They were just here for a Sunday afternoon and half day Monday, but we loved having them. We grilled out and did lots of playing. Phillip and Loren even came over for dinner Sunday night! Josh's birthday was the day before they came, and they had gone to San Antonio for the weekend to visit some friends and go to Sea World. Cam (my dad-in-law) came up Sunday night and all 3 boys went and played golf here in Austin Monday morning. Cam and Judy just bought a pop-up camper that they are storing in our garage so he brought that with him. We got a pretty sweet deal from that since we are allowed to use it anytime we want in exchange for storing it for them. We are already planning our first camping trip with it!

I didn't get any pictures from that weekend since I was too busy playing and hosting, but Lisa got a sweet picture of Abby and Gaius hanging out in his window:

Apparently a few min later, she had a book out and was sitting up there reading to Gaius and her dolly. Did that make your heart melt just a little? Yeah, mine too :).

Our third set of visitors were my parents!

Kristen's semester is almost over, so they came up for the weekend and took a car load of her stuff home with them. We spent most of the day just hanging out and playing board games. Saturday night, we went and played putt-putt and got ice cream. We missed having Phillip with us, but he is currently having the time of his life on a 10 day trip to Italy! We all had a great time and I told them they really should visit more!

Garden:

My strawberry bush is doing so great! I picked these the other day and they tasted amazing. It's almost time to plant again, and we are planning on putting in several tomato plants and green beans!

So that was our month! Things should be slowing down just a little bit and I already have a list of projects around the house that I want to try to accomplish in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

Organizing My House: Closet Edition

So I have 3 storage closets in my house. One downstairs and one in each of my 2 guest bedrooms upstairs. The downstairs closet looked like this:

Pretty embarrassing right?? Yeah, the ones upstairs were not any better. Basically there was no visible floor space, and sometimes things fell out when you opened the doors. I forgot to get pictures of the upstairs closets before I emptied them since I seem to get too excited about projects and totally forget to take pictures before I start cleaning. Oh well. Just trust me that they were terrible.

I tried to group things together that made sense and moved everything around to where it worked better. I actually had a few storage containers and a small set of plastic drawers already, and only had to invest in a couple more from target. We put a few big things in the attic, and I got rid of a good amount of junk that we just don't need.

So in this room/closet, I used one under the bed storage container for all my extra sets of sheets and pillow cases, and another one for all my scarves. Michael had 2 garment bags from his days in band and they were perfect for storing my rolls of gift wrap. Both bags also had big pockets on the back that were just the right size for storing my gift bags and boxes. The drawers store all the rest of my gift wrapping supplies, mailing supplies, and then all our blank notepads/spirals. There is also a tub that holds all my finished sewing projects. On the top right, those are just extra empty containers!!

The other upstairs closet was filled with tons of boxes with mostly old pictures, extra pictures frames, old cards, scrapbook stuff, etc that was junking up the closet. Turns out most of the boxes were only half filled so just emptying them freed up a ton of space. Basically, all that stuff fit in these drawers, plus there was an extra drawer available for me to store all my crafting supplies. The purple box holds our old VCR and movies and some extra cables/cords that Michael wanted to keep. The pink box and the clear containers at the top hold our old momentos from growing up.

The downstairs closet now holds one big tub with all our nintendo games, controllers, and old gaming systems, and the other one holds all our toys and kids books that we keep around for visitors. I moved most of the rest of the stuff that was in there earlier either upstairs or threw out so that left tons of room to put the chairs back in neatly. There is so much extra floor space in there now!

So there you have it, my closets now look amazing, and you know way more details about how it was done than you ever really wanted to. My next victim is going to be the cabinets under our bathroom sinks!