Getting organised

When we moved house almost a year ago (!!!) I was excited at the prospect of having a playroom for Leah, and anyone else who might come along. As I spoke about in this post it was very easy in a bigger house to stick everything in a place and just forget about it, because the house was so much bigger than our first little home. Of course, without proper organisation, I just wasn't happy with the state of affairs around here, so have begun doing bits and pieces here and there that are making me far too happy (Read: OCD nerd).

So far I've done:
The linen closet
The ensuite walk in wardrobe
and I even beautified a set of plastic drawers.

With our impending arrival (T minus less than three months GULP!) we needed to make a space for the cot and changing table etc, and in addition to this it was high time our 'spare room' was utilised for us, rather than just waiting for a guest to come and stay (as nice as having a space for this is). I'd been pinning up a storm of ideas for play rooms for ages, and with fixing up the garage (post to come tomorrow), it was the perfect time to get some things into storage

, have a bit of a shift around, and some organisation.

I'm pretty happy with the result. Here are the before pics.

And as we were in the midst of it.

And here are the pics I took this morning with everything finished up. The only thing I'd like to add is a bit of bunting here and there.

This last photo shows an image of Leah's craft table in her room, which has now been moved into her craft nook in the play room (pics two and three). She loves it. Just looking into getting some more light in there!

Wordless Wednesday - Nesting already?

From this:

To this:

And this... to this:

Making things pretty - 5 tier plastic drawers

I've always been a fan of making things pretty, and with the incoming new addition to the family (T minus 19 weeks) and a change of rooms/rethink of the way our study/Leah's room/spare rooms are used I'm getting a bit nutty with it.

I plan to do a lot more and I promise I will share with you all, but I wanted to show you my attempt at this little project from Simply Living that I'm sure most of you pinterest stalkers like myself have seen once or twice.

I've had the idea in the back of my mind for over a year now and in a spat of boredom this morning, it happened.

This is what my drawers looked like before. Now, I must admit that I've had a clean out of these drawers recently, so they are relatively tidy (ie: looking through the front to what was inside wasn't exactly a disgusting exercise), but even so, the goal for me wasn't to hide clutter, as the simply living blogger was trying to do. I simply wanted to make them prettier!

 I started with this selection of paper, but substituted out the peach coloured number for a darker purple one which I thought would balance the greyish tones better. Application is as easy as cut to size, modge podge and smooth. The blog link I already mentioned has more indepth instructions and I don't want to take the idea away from them so I'll let you go-a' snoopin'.

This is how my drawers ended up looking. They're a bit Monet (fine from far away but don't get up too close). They way my set of drawers is designed was difficult to get the paper in, in an easy manner, but I tried to make it work the best I could.

What do you think?

The bigger the space, the easier it is to forget about mess.

When we moved (last JUNE) I had a plan. The plan was to make the house as stunning as possible, not unlike the beautiful homes showcased on I <3 Organizing and Bowl full of Lemons. That level of organisation just sings to my little OCD heart. 

Unfortunately my 'a bigger house was going to be easier to organise, right? Lots more space means lots more opportunities to organise' mentality was shortly lived. Bigger space meant that I could hide mess or run away from it, as opposed to our old, little house where there was no room to hide!

Well not anymore! It might be my pregnant brain, or it might be my school holiday brain...but whatever it is. I like it.

For the almost a year since we moved in, this is what my linen closet looked like:

But after a short trip to the warehouse and a few hours work over the weekend. Voila!

Leah's Room - The organisation continues!

Leah's bedroom was a place I've been dreading cleaning out. Babies accumulate a lot of stuff... and her room showed that. Here are some before pics.

As you can see there was just too much stuff. I don't have a photo (of before or after) but I big part of cleaning up Leah's room was working through her old clothes. When I was pregnant I was very lucky to have lovely friends gift us clothes from when their wee girls we under 1. So I had a range of clothes from Newborn to 12 months. I bought 4 60l plastic bins and organised the clothes into 0-3, 3-6, 6-9 and 9-12 months, they even had pretty labels. Unfortunately this just allowed me to pile clothes in there when they were too small and not be too discerning on whether we'd actually use them again with other children. So my first job was to hunt through these and purge.

Another thing I've been desperate to do for a while is get rid of the feeding chair as Leah no longer has a bottle at all. Luckily I needed a new teaching chair and it's gone into school - clever! So much more room now.

Here's how the room is organised now.

Another major thing I did was organise Leah's books. She has SO many already, we just love books, but I was getting frustrated with finding her in her room reading to herself and accidentally ripping pages. So I put all the rippable pages away (see closet org) and only left out board books and special favourites that mum and dad like reading. Clever mum. Looks so much more neater AND meant that one shelf was free for musical instruments!

I also got around to putting photos in the two animal photo frames that I bought BEFORE Leah was born. Jeez. 17 months to get them sorted. Shocking parenting! Here is the ladybird one, you can see the elephant frame on the top of her book shelf.

 Purging some of Leah's clothes has meant that I had an extra 60l container to play with. I popped all Leah's crib linen in there. Cleaned up one of the shelves a treat. All of Leah's big girl books are now kept at the top of the closet. Everything else just got a spruce up in here and looks good now.

I made Leah a clip holder.... she was way too many clips.

Leah's easel was moved and now with the blackboard facing out she's loving it! She also loves eating chalk which isn't ideal.

Lastly, I went through all of Leah's toys and organised them into the baskets a bit better.

Looks great! Wonder what I'll be purging next week?

Week 2 - The Garage

The garage on our property is a 'No Kate Zone'. Mr. Man is an avid car enthusiast and his garage is where all this car enthusiasm goes. I go in now and again and help him give it a bit of a clean out, but nothing like I'd really like to do with the place. It's his little haven and I'm happy for it to stay that way.

The 'Man Cave' is another story. When we moved into this house the Man Cave was a place where we had the drum kit, a stereo, all of Mr. Man's car magazines and a couch. In between car ventures hubby would sit in there and dream and do whatever men do in their own company. Over time the man cave has become a storage area and has a bed, chilly bin, storage bins and all sorts of baby parafernalia. Poor Mr. Man, hopefully in our next house he will be able to have a space of his own.

So this is what the man cave looked like today when I got in there:

I couldn't even open the door completely and things were basically just piled on the bed in a haphazard way. Now I was under no illusions. We need most of this stuff to remain in storage, it's not just a general dumping ground but somewhere where we can store things that we will use in future. Because of this the finished product isn't exactly how I would like it but, as I've conceded in the past, we're having to make do with the space we have in this house and the plethora of knick knacks we have.

So after a shuffle round and getting rid of a few things - selling a couple of things and getting my mum to store a few things at her place (family bassinet), as well as pulling some things out that will be heading off to my classroom when I go back in the next couple of weeks. This is what I managed to get it looking like:

Not too bad really. We can walk in again at least. I also tried to make sure anything that we needed to get at to use was easily accesible. So this might help with it staying like this for longer. Fingers crossed!

Another week to cross off my 14 weeks of organising! YES!

ORG-AN-ISED

52 goals in 52 weeks is cranking along. Here's the before and after of my closet...

...and my donate pile:

 The chuck outs:

And the selling pile:

Boom. Hope this purging never leaves my system. Feels good to get rid of stuff I'm not using!

A week of organising the Kitchen

One of my 52 goals in 52 Weeks is to complete the 14 week of home organisation from a Bowl Full of Lemons.

I have said that I may take a little bit longer than 14 weeks but we'll see how we go. Once I get in the cleaning (and purging) mood it's good to run with it.

Week 1 is The Kitchen. Here are some before photos of our kitchen.

I do try to keep my kitchen (and whole house) as clean as possible and I also like to think I'm a very organised person, but I suffer from something many people do, over buying. I like things. I have the means to buy some of it, and boy do I!

The first thing I needed to do was de-clutter. So today I have got stuck into the drawers and cupboards. I got everything (or as much as I could as a time) out onto the dining table and then reorganised the cupboards and drawers. Was an all day job but I'm happy with the progress. I wiped out all the surfaces, threw lots of unused things away and am going to sell some things we no longer use to start my 'kitchenaide fund'.

Here are some before and after photos;

This isn't even half of it!

Leah 'helped' to get the bottom drawers done.

Day Two has seen me cleaning out the pantry and fridge/freezer. I do this fairly often too, but again, with such a small space, I'm never going to have a kitchen that is as elegant as the one from 'A bowl full of Lemons'.

Here is the before of my pantry - see, not so bad;

And here is the after, much less chaos;

And even though I do clean out my pantry periodically there were things I needed to throw out that just got lost in the back of the cupboard or not checked recently enough.

What I like about the new organisation is the spice and baking bits and bobs shelf, second down on the left as before I was always searching for my spices and herbs, or buying ones I already had hiding away.

It also gave me a chance to secure the labels on my baking items as they were looking like this;

And I must admit. I have a junk spot in my pantry. This is where I put packets of things that won't completely fit into containers, like a half emptied caster sugar bag.

Again, the fridge and freezer are something I've recently cleaned too, so there is nothing expired etc in there. Yay! Just a quick wipe out. Here's the freezer make over.

One other thing that I've done recently is something else The Bowl full of Lemons blog talks about in the kitchen post, so thought I better cover it too. Our sickie drawers. Even with pretty labels, go me!

The last day of our kitchen clean up (today) saw us wiping down all surfaces. The place is sparkling. One issue I have just moved for another day though (and is also another 52 in 52 goal) is the cook books. Oh boy.

Here are the finished pictures of our kitchen.

I'm super happy with the amount of stuff I was able to part with and I'm keen as to get stuck into the other areas of the house. It makes things a lot easier to clean when you don't have as much. Something I'm still wanting to do is clean the curtain above the windows and clean the windows, but that's for another focus :).