Use what you have.

I am a firm believer in reusing the things that I already have around the house to create the things that we need.  Today, we needed some little girl closet organization.  All of my girls are responsible for putting their own laundry away.  Zion is old enough to put her away, but she's not quite tall enough to reach the bar. Even with the stool, she was just barely tall enough to reach the bottom of the hangers.  She needed a lower bar to hang her clothes.  Because we rent our house, I can't just go around drilling holes into the wall.  So, after wandering from room to room this afternoon trying to come up with a solution, I remembered this discarded piece of furniture in the garage...

I found this on the side of the road ages ago and it used to house bins of toys in the little girls' room, but it didn't work out so well.  It has been living in our garage ever since.  I was going to sell this in my fantasy yard sale that I am planning only in my mind, but it was perfect for Zion's new closet organization!  I removed the sets of bars in the center leaving on the three at the top and three at the bottom (so that it would remain stable) and voila!  Zion can easily hang her shirts when it is time to put her laundry away.  Bijou is tall enough, so her shirts are on top.

We still keep their bottoms on the top shelf.  They would carpet their room in clothes if they had access to all of them.  

Deconstructed Closet Organization

So, I will be the first one to admit that I am NOT a great housekeeper.  I own a lot of things.  I collect a lot of things.  I have a lot of things.  I am okay with that.  It's a part of who I am.  That being said, I am not a fan of being surrounded by tons of things with no particular place for them to go.  The current thorn in my side is my bedroom.  The hubs and I have a pretty good sized bedroom and closet, but it always seems like there are clothes everywhere.  The problem - we never put all of our laundry away.  Ever.  We wash, dry, fold and leave it in the basket.  Eventually, we need the basket for dirty clothes and so we dump the clean clothes on the chair or the bed with all intentions to put it away later.  It never happens.  So, I proposed that we stop even intending to put the laundry away.  Just don't.  It's a crazy concept, I know.  But here's what we've done.  I went to the store and bought two cheapy plastic storage shelves, like the ones that you would put in the garage, and 12 (yes 12) laundry baskets.  I set up the shelves in out closet (one for the hubs and one for me) and put two laundry baskets on each shelf (six for him, six for me).  The shelves and baskets serve as a sort of tiered laundry system.  The baskets on the top shelf contain clean t-shirts and tank tops, my middle shelf has pajamas, socks and underwear and those in between clothes that can be worn again before they have to be washed, and the bottom shelf is dirty laundry.  So when the dirty laundry basket is full, I just pull the whole basket out, dump it in the wash and toss the clean clothes back into their respective baskets.  Voila!  I still fold my jeans and put them on the closet shelf and hang my (very few) dresses, but I think this system will word out well for us.

It's definitely not the prettiest closet makeover you are going to find, but pretty doesn't always work for me.

Big Girls' Room Redo

Jena and Ashni wanted to rearrange their room.  This is the only picture that I have of their room before. They don't have a very big room, so re-configuring furniture was a feat.  Oddly enough, they wanted to push their beds together to make on giant bed (Jena has a full size bed and Ashni has a twin).  I say "oddly enough" because they fight (a lot), but for some reason, at the end of the day, they always want to sleep together.  They decided where they wanted to put things and spent the entire day yesterday rearranging.

Little Reminders

I am a big fan of little reminders for the kids to help them remember the things that need to get done each day - particularly the younger kids.  So I thought I would share a couple of the little reminders I have for the girls.  These two just happen to be in their bathroom.  I used to have two that couldn't read (now I just have one), so the reminders have to have pictures.  Here's our potty reminder for Zion.  They are just little drawings that I made in some frames I had in the garage (spray painted red).

This is our reminder for the all of the girls.  Since I've started working, I'm not here to make sure that everyone is taking care of those basic needs in the morning.  This way, they can still see what needs to be done each morning and evening.  Sharpie works really well on mirrors and comes off easily with alcohol.

Some day I will get a really good camera and learn how to take really good pictures and then these pictures won't be blurry, but you get the idea.

Little Girls' Room Do-Over

Not long ago, I posted about the girls bedroom makeovers.  All in all, their rooms have stayed about the same.  But the little girls' room seemed to become the bane of my existence every week.  It was constantly a mess, no one ever wanted to clean it up and things were getting broken and torn form being stepped on.  It was driving me insane!  A few weeks ago, I decided to take half of the "stuff" that they had and store it in the garage (to rotate out next summer).   Things were STILL constantly a mess.   So yesterday, I decided that today would be spent cleaning house and the little girls' room was my first stop.  As I was cleaning (mainly alone, because Bijou decided to spend this time laying on her back staring at the ceiling), I realized that it was pretty difficult to get toys in and out of the bins on the shelf. 

The only logical solution, of course, was to build a new shelf.  So, that's what I did!  I am going to insert a complaint here.  I love Home Depot, don't get me wrong.  But I was SO annoyed with HD today.  I went in to get wood for the shelf, found the pieces that I needed place neatly above a $5.98 price tag.  The very helpful HD employee even did some comparison pricing for me with a piece twice the size to see if we could cut a cents off the price by just cutting them in half.  We found that it would be about the same price, so I got my four boards.  The very helpful HD employee cut my boards and loaded them into my cart.  I get to the cash register with my plan to spend about $27 on wood and about $4 on nails.  The checkout girls scans the pieces and they are $8.40 a piece!  I mean, it's not a HUGE difference, but it added like $12 - $14 to my total cost!  I was so annoyed...ugh.  Anyway, complaint over...  The shelves were quick and easy to put together and the bins are much more accessible for small people who don't want to work to hard get their toys put away.

Sping Cleaning

Since the warm weather seems to be here to stay (finally), I figured I'd hop on board with this whole spring cleaning myth I keep hearing so much about. I admit it, I am NOT an established house keeper. I collect clutter, but in my defense my clutter tends to turn into the fun projects that I share here with all of you. What would my life be without my random piles of collected crap, right?! Well, honestly, I would like to have a neat house. I love looking at the photos of well decorated, impeccably clean homes filled with put together moms and stylish kids. But more often than not, my carpet has Cheerios crushed into it, our dining room table is perpetually sticky or covered in paint, there is no noticeable surface to my desk and I couldn't tell you the last time our bed was made more than two mornings in a row. BUT I am trying to live more like the mother of four and less like a frat boy. So today, I thought I would share the project that has been the thorn in my side for months. I'm not proud and under normal circumstances would not share this sight with any human being that had not previously seen me in, say, my underwear, but we're all friends here, right? So here it is, my closet.


Somewhere beneath the pile is a floor. I know it's there because we probably would not have moved in if the closet hadn't come with a floor, but I couldn't tell you the last time we actually saw the floor. But I did it! I tackled the closet and it may have taken me days (DAYS I tell you), but I found the floor. Not only did I find the floor, I got rid of massive amounts of outgrown baby clothes and cloth diapers, found articles of clothing that I forgot I had and created room to actually move about freely in there. There is ample space in there now for my clothes, my husband's clothes AND the baby's clothes.




I'm going to master this grown-up thing if it kills me!! (But hopefully it won't)