New Year, New Closets

After we came back to Austin from Dallas, we still had 3 more days off! So to start the new year off right, I decided to organize some closets!

Our house came with lots of great storage and all our closets are in bad bad need of organizing. My goal is to try to get alll of them done sometime over this next year.

So my first 2 victims were the hall closet and our pantry. Here are the before pictures:

And now, the after!!

 This just really makes me happy :).

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!

Friday Five

TGIF!!!

This year is seriously flying by; its already almost the second week of march?? Crazy.
Well I am super ready for the weekend, we are going to try to make a day trip to Dallas tomorrow to go to our niece Abby's 3rd birthday party. Hopefully nothing crazy comes up at Michael's work today that would cause him to have to work this weekend. We have not had a free weekend to go to Dallas since December, so we are waaay overdue. Anyways, since its Friday, and I am trying to avoid the pile of paperwork sitting in front of me here at work, here's 5 random things that have been going on around here the past few weeks.

1. I got to babysit Garrett while his mom went to a Bat Mitzvah (for the girl she used to nanny). He was not feeling the best, but we still had fun. We took Gaius on a long walk, and Garrett spent lots of time eating/drooling on all the toys :).

 Lucy and her mom did some shopping down south that day, so they stopped by to play for a little bit too! Love these 2 babies!

2. I spent last Saturday hanging out all day with my little sis! I had some gift cards from Christmas and needed to do a little bit of updating to my wardrobe, so we spend the day at the mall :). Kristen has a pretty great sense of style (which I inherited basically none of) so I try to do most of my clothes shopping with her. Plus, we haven't had the chance to hang out in awhile, so it was fun being able to spend the day with her. I'm so glad she lives in Austin!

3. About 2 weeks ago, me and Kristen went to a deaf social club event at Starbucks. She is taking ASL for her foreign language at ACC, and one of their assignments is to attend 2 events per semester. I just wanted to go so I could practice more and see if I am retaining what I am learning. It was mostly people from her sign language class that were there for the hour we were able to stay for, but I was encouraged at how much I actually understood! I told Kristen that I want to try to go to the next event with her so that I can keep practicing.

4. Michael built a shelf!
He got the idea from my Uncle John, who builds a little shelf in the pantry of every house he lives in to store cans in an organized and neat way. We didn't have a clear wall big enough in our pantry for it, so we decided to build it in our little "midget closet" in the kitchen. He worked on it the day that I was babysitting Garrett, and I think he did a pretty great job! Now that I have this shelf, I can buy endless amounts of canned goods :).

Now I need to clean out and organize that mess of a closet behind him! It's pretty gross right now :(

5. I have been running a lot lately; and by running I really mean jogging at a moderately slow pace? haha, but seriously, I can't believe I have been able to keep it up this long and I can feel my endurance building up quite a bit from what it used to be. I have been jogging at the park at least 2-3 times a week with Gaius, and have been very surprised at how much I enjoy and actually look forward to it! Who woulda thought?

Happy Weekend!

Organizing My House: Master Closet Edition

I've got another room organized! Well ok, so its a closet, BUT a very important closet. We use this closet every day and it had finally reached a point where I couldn't take the mess anymore. Also, since we mounted the TV and weren't using the shelf in the upstairs living area anymore, I saw a great opportunity to use it in the closet.  

So here's the very embarrassing state of my closet before:

We have all these great built-in shelving units and really just have no excuse for the mess this closet was in. Just comes down to laziness, and no defined area for things to live. I basically spent most of a Saturday taking things out, filling up a bag of stuff we don't need anymore for goodwill, and putting it all back in an organized fashion. I only ended up needing to buy 2 big bins and 3 small ones (since we already had the wire shelves and the small brown bookshelf) so this was a very cheap project that ended up with wonderful results.
Here's the after:

The brown shelf fit perfectly on Michael's side of the closet and was a great place to put some of his miscellaneous things (like clothes that have holes and are only appropriate for walking Gaius at the park) that looks really nice. The pictures aren't the best because its really hard to take good pictures, but you can get the general idea. So far, we have lived with it for about a week and I am loving it!

Organizing My House: Kitchen Edition

Woohoo, the kitchen is organized!

I talked a couple of months ago about wanting to get my house organized, and focus numero uno was the kitchen. I obviously spend a lot of time there, and it was pretty bad. Here's a few pictures of the mess.

this pantry was probably the worst of all-yuck!

This has been a very slow project because I had this "organizational epiphany" right before the holiday season. I spent the month of December (in between christmas shopping and traveling) figuring out my game plan and gathering supplies. I probably spent waaay too much time on pinterest looking at an overwhelming amount of advice and ideas.
Last Saturday, I had absolutely nothing going on, and we were dog-sitting, so I spent the whole day going to town in that kitchen. I got everything in order and cleaned the entire thing. It looks great. Some of the cabinets didn't have huge changes, but overall it just feels so much better and things are easier to find. I even put labels on the bins in the pantry so Michael knows exactly where everything goes :).

I cleared off my counter-tops and put all my cookbooks up above the stove with the lighters and matches

 This cabinet mainly got cleared out and baskets were added to hold our dishtowels and vitamins

 Yay for an organized tupperware cabinet!

This used to house a lot of our small appliances and I could never find anything! It was one of those cabinets where everything fell out when you opened the doors.

 My spices were in rough shape and I had doubles of several things because I could never find what I needed. I found this idea from a blog and amazon prime sold them to me for pretty cheap. I think this cabinet door is my favorite area of the whole kitchen!

In the pantry, I added bins and grouped things together and labeled them. There was plenty of room, so I found a shelf at Lowe's that matched the others and we added it to the top for more storage space. I cleared all my small appliances out of a bottom cabinet and put them on the top 2 shelves of the pantry. The very top is for things we don't use very often, but still want to keep, and the shelf below that is for things we use fairly often, but don't want taking up space on the counter-top. 

I am so happy that I finally finished and how it all turned out! I won't bore you with pictures of all my other cabinets :), but here's a quick before and after of my laundry area that I cleaned up along with the kitchen since its in the same room as my pantry.

This is usually how it looked before (with dog towels up in that left corner when they were clean)

And now, its still a little crowded, but looks way better!

Alright, now on to the next project!

Organization Kick-Off

The time has come. I am going to officially organize my entire house. Just the thought of everything being cleaned out and in order makes a type A person like me ridiculously excited!! (yes, I know I'm a dork) Obviously organizing my entire house is going to take  a lot of time and some $$, so don't expect a weekly update on my progress. I am thinking of a goal of 1 year for this project, but could be shorter depending on how crazy I get?? Hopefully, as I organize and deep clean different areas of my house, I will be able to get ideas and the desire to do more decorating and painting and other fun aesthetic updates to our house. :) Right now, I am working on a game plan for my first victim, the kitchen and pantry. Boy do I have my work cut out for me there!

I of course am suuuper impatient when I get what I believe is a "great idea" so I decided that I really needed to organize something that day. This was when Emily was here, so we made a wal-mart run for a shoe organizer and some command hooks and I organized the cabinet under the kitchen sink. In my excitement, I totally forgot to take pictures of what it looked like before, but just take my word for the fact that it was gross. Basically, you couldn't see any pipes and I had to clean who knows what off the bottom of the cabinet when I took everything out-gross gross gross! Needless to say, it now looks sooo much better, plus I only spent $10 on supplies!!

Garage Makeover

My awesome husband decided to organize and clean out the garage a couple of weeks ago when he was off. He  has been green with garage-envy of other people in the neighborhood, so I'm glad he was able to have some time off to make it look the way he wanted. He built some shelves kinda high up so that stuff is out of the way, and was able to get almost everything up off the floor. I wish I had taken pictures of what it looked like before, because the difference is pretty crazy. There is so much room in there now! I just hope that we can keep it looking this good for a long time....