The Hallway Closet Project

For those of you Friends lovers out there, you'll understand the following reference... I have a Monica Gellar closet!  I know what is in there and where everything is, but pretty much no one else can find a thing!!  Usually this is no problem, but with the 2 months of colds and illnesses we experienced and midnight trips to the closet to find medications, I realized that I needed to do something so that I'm not the only one who knows where things are.  When you open the doors, here is what you will see...

So I exaggerated a little, it's not quite as bad as Monica Gellar's closet, but there is a lot going on in there.  I decided to tackle it one step at a time.

1. Organize those Meds

The medicine shelf is a disaster and as 2 year old B continues to grow, it is also within reach of small hands.  I decided to clean out the meds and move them up a shelf to keep them out of reach of curious toddlers.  First Nick and I went through all the bottles and tossed* what has expired and what we don't need or use.  Then I made groups of like meds.  Here they are in their groups just waiting for a storage tub to be placed in:

*When I say tossed, I mean dispose of the meds in an environmentally safe way.  We threw away the vitamins, but recycled the vitamin bottles.  All the other expired and unneeded meds (prescriptions, pain relievers, allergy relief, etc.) we kept in their bottles and containers and took them to a pharmacy where the pharmacy will dispose of them safely.  If you are curious about how the pharmacy disposes the meds safely and which pharmacies take expired medications, check out this website: http://www.takebackyourmeds.org.

I also had Nick make a baby dosage table with weight and amount of Tylenol, Benadryl for allergy, and Benadryl for severe allergy needed to add to the Kids & Baby Meds tub for a just in case I am having an emergency and can't think straight moment.

2.  Clean up the Towels

We have so many towels and we hardly use them.  It was time to decide what towels to keep and what to get rid of.  Take a look at the next picture to see how we narrowed our piles of towels to just the ones we need and use: 

If you need a comparison, take a look at the before picture at the top of this post!

If this looks like very few towels it is because the towels we are currently using are in the bathroom and these are just extras... and some of the extra towels were being used to mop up yet another basement flood at the time of this photo.  We also keep the girls' towels in one of their closets.

3. Everything Else

Just like with the meds, I took out each item on the bottom 3 shelves and the top shelf and either placed them in a like pile, threw them away, or put them in the Goodwill pile.

Next I found a place on the shelves for the items and put them back in the closet.  Seeing where the items will go and how much of each thing I have will help me figure out what type of storage container I need to get:

4. Everything Needs a Home

Ah yes, the fun part... storage!  I have to say that I'm pretty sure one of the reasons I decided to organize the hallway closet was to have an excuse to buy storage containers.  Here is a list of what got a home and where I bought the tubs and baskets:

• medications - The Dollar Store 
• light bulbs - Hobby Lobby
• cleaning supplies - Hobby Lobby
• linens - Target
• odds and ends - Target
• thermal devices (yes, we have a whole basket full of things to keep our muscles and ourselves warm!) - Target

I also bought shelf dividers to keep the items that don't go in tubs or baskets separated, but when I started to put them on the shelves, they scraped the shelf liner (see #5 below) and I ended up with holes in that shelf liner that I had already wrestled to put on, so I ended up only using them for the top shelf:

5. Line the Sheves

I've never lined shelves before, but one of my favorite daily blogs, iheartorganizing, always emphasizes how the added touch of shelf lining can just brighten up an area and make you feel good when you see it, so I decided to give it a try.  I had a love/hate relationship with that shelf liner and it was partly due to the uneven shelves that are in that closet, but in the end I think it added a nice finishing touch.

After looking at lots of shelf liner online, I ended up getting this adhesive shelf line/contact paper at Target.

6. Label It

I'm not a big labeler, but I knew that if this closet didn't get labeled, then nothing would get put back in its place and I'd be writing another blog post in a few months about my re-organization of the hallway closet.  It turns out, though, that I had a blast labeling.  I labeled in 2 ways:

The first way was to use mini clothes pins to attach labels to the medication, thermal devices, and odds & ends tubs.  To make the clothes pins pretty, I had originally planned to use washi tape, but then I came across the new patterned duct tapes and I really liked some of the patterns, so I went with duct tape to cover the clothes pins.  

Then I wrote the labels on business card paper that we've had forever, glued those cards onto pretty scrapbooking paper and tada...

The other way I labeled was to label the items that sit directly on the shelves.  I decided to buy chalkboard labels and a chalkboard pen to make the labels with.  They turned out pretty cute and Nick actually thanked me for labeling everything so that he now knows where to put things back and what is what (he could never figure out which towels were rags and which ones were the nicer towels).

It took me the whole month of March, but it is ALL done! 

BEFORE

AFTER

As I added that last picture, I noticed the tube of toothpaste that a certain 2 year old must have added to the closet as I was doing the finishing touches - that little sneaker!

It feels so good to have that space organized.  I keep opening up the closet and admiring the calmness of it!

Organizing Ideas

As baby M was peacefully napping in my arms and 2 year old B was sound asleep in her room, I spent a quiet afternoon engrossed in the Better Homes and Gardens website getting all kinds of fun organizing ideas.  I came across a slideshow of free printable storage labels and although I don't know if I'd label everything, I liked a lot of the organizational ideas.  I thought I'd share some of my favorites...

1. Magnetic Menu Board - Keep a list of dishes on magnetic labels under headings and then mix and match on a magnetic calendar board to plan meals.

This seems like a lot of work to make, but for a person who loves to plan meals ahead of time, this system looks like so much fun!

2. Shelf Labels - My next home project is to tackle our hallway closet so I was intrigued by the idea of labeling the places where items should be so that those items will always make it back to where they belong.

3. Weekly Wardrobe - Back when I was working full time I used to try and lay out my clothes for the week so that I could save the time searching for clothes in the morning and sleep a few extra minutes.  Once 2 year old B starts school I can totally see laying out a weekly wardrobe for her.  I love the idea of putting hooks on the closet to hang the outfits.

4. Clear Canisters for Beauty Supples - I not only love the clear canisters, but I love the idea of putting them on a cute tray to keep them in one place.

5. On the Go Bags - So you're never left scrambling for a snack or activity!

6. A Place for Everyday Things - I have already started to try and organize something like this in my house.  I'm not so much for the labels, but I like the idea of dividing items.  I have a tray I keep these things in and now I need to find a way to divide them.

7. One Basket Per Person - A great way to keep shoes, hats, scarves, etc. organized and easy to find.  Ooh, and I could designate one basket for the on the go bags (see #5 above)!


Not too bad of a way to spend a lazy afternoon!

Weekly Menu: Back to Normal

With things relatively back to normal around my house, I decided to pull out some favorite recipes that we haven't had for awhile and throw in a new one while I'm at it.  Here is what we ate this week:

1. turkey tacos and peppers
2. spinach and brown rice tomato soup (this was the new recipe) and paninis - So this one didn't turn out very well.  It has potential, but I followed the recipe to a T, even though Nick and I questioned its methods.  The recipe says to add the rice to the soup 5 minutes before serving.  Well, that made for some crunchy tomato soup!  If I try this again, I will cook the rice before adding it to the soup.  It was pretty inedible.
3. meatball sandwiches, Caesar salad
4. homemade fish sticks, kale, bread
5. spinach and chicken quiche, broccoli as a side

The things I love about quiche are that I can make them ahead of time, I can put whatever I want in them, they make great left overs, and they remind me of home.  Here is the quiche recipe that my mom still uses and that I now get to make:

veggies and/or meat of your choice
3/4 cup Bisquick
3 eggs
1 1/2 cups milk
2 cups sharp cheddar cheese
2 Tbsp. butter

1. cook up any ingredients that need to be cooked (I use 2 chicken breasts, but my mom likes to use 1 lb of bacon)
2. spray the pan and layer the veggies and/or meat with cheese (I go... chicken, spinach, cheese, chicken, spinach, cheese)
3. beat the bisquick, eggs, and milk in a bowl and then pour the mixture into the pan
4. slice the butter and place it on top of the mixture...

5. bake at 400 degrees for about 30 minutes
6. let cool for a few minutes after taking it out of the oven to let it set completely

The final product...

Well there you go!  Hope everyone else had a relatively normal week!!

From Bad to Worse... to Worser??

Okay, I'm not sure if worser is a word, but I've decided to make it one.  If you read my last post you'll know that there isn't a whole lot of sleep happening in my house.  Most days I can get up from a loooong night and somehow function as if I'd had enough sleep, but other days I drag.  On Monday morning after being up with a coughing baby for 3 hours, I was having a hard time functioning.  I was foggy, baby M was cranky, and the impulsive neurons in 2 year old B's brain were firing at full speed (I don't know if that's a real thing, but it makes me feel better to give a scientific explanation to the reason why 2 year old B is only wearing tennis shoes and a soft cap while wildly running around the house yelling, "bare bum Baya, you better watch out!" while I am trying to catch her so I can get her dressed and in the car so I can make it to work on time - ah).

On this morning, I somehow managed to get all 3 of us dressed, fed, had my 4 + bags packed and ready to load in the car for the day, and I just needed to run downstairs to throw some dirty towels in the wash.  I grabbed the towels and headed downstairs and if you were a fly on the wall in my house, you would have heard the following series of sounds as I stepped off the bottom step: "squish squish squish, splash SPLASH, "oh @#$%!"

Worser.

It turns out that way far down in the pipes a root worked its way in and has been collecting all kinds of fun things that try to flow past it and then one day it collected one too many things and blocked up the whole outflow pipe which caused a water explosion out of the toilet!  At the time though all I knew was there was a lot of water... I mean A LOT of water just pooling on and under the laminate floors, under the washer and dryer, around the water heater, and in the bathroom.  The water managed to seep its way into every crevice and under every piece of furniture it could.  Oh and the water even made its way into my newly organized office area.  I used all the towels in the house to try and soak it up and eventually had to give up because I needed to go to work.  This is where the best dad in the world comes into play and came over while I was at work to Shopvac up as much water as he could.  He said he quit after vacuuming up about 3 gallons of water! Although anyone who looked at that room would think it didn't look organized, it actually was.  There were just piles of things to go to goodwill scattered about and a bunch of Christmas lights that needed to be put away lining one of the walls.  But now, it looks like this...

Those towels piled up in the sink are from my frantic attempt to mop up all the water.

Oh and my newly organized office area looked like this for a few weeks...

But now it looks like this...

And the playroom we love to spend so much time in now looks like this...

Ugh!!

P.S.  To make matters even worser my nanny quit... by voicemail... with no notice so I was left scrambling to find childcare!

Geesh, rough week!!!

Baby M's calendar

I'm tired these days, oh so tired!  Since going back to work baby M has decided she needs extra cuddles at night, then she got sick, then I got sick, then 2 year old B got sick, then Nick got sick, and now that we're all sort of healthy, baby M has decided to practice her new rolling over and moving around skills in her crib in the middle of the night instead of sleeping.  And don't get me started on getting up with 2 year old B... that is its own set of issues!  Sleep isn't the only thing that I either haven't done or done very little of in the last 7 months, though. Since I'm tired, I get a free pass at being whiney and will provide you with a list of the things I have been missing out on lately:

1. Sleep!
2. What is a haircut?
3. And remind me again what a hair dryer does??
4. My teeth could definitely use a good clean and polish.
5. The closest thing I've had to a girls night in a while is drinking wine while watching Downton Abbey and The Mindy Project with Nick.
6. Exercise.

Okay, enough complaining, and really, who needs those things when you've got these girls to play with and snuggle everyday...
 

Well actually, a cute smile won't clean my teeth so maybe I do need to make it to the dentist.  

This blog post is actually about number 7 on my list of things that haven't really happened in the last 7 months - the baby book.  To be perfectly honest, I don't have a book for baby M... I never even ended up buying one for her.  What I did end up doing was a calendar.  I give all the credit for this idea to my friend Katie B. who told me her mom did this for her and her brother and sister.  When baby M was getting closer to arriving and I was thinking about a baby book for her, I came to the conclusion that I needed something easy and accessible to help me remember all of her milestones and development.  That's when I decided to keep a calendar by my bed.  I printed a monthly calendar from printfree.com for baby M's first year.  Here is what the February one looks like:

February 2013
Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28
January 2013	Printfree.com      Printable Calendars					March 2013

I keep the calendar in my nightstand drawer and the plan was that when I would go to bed at night I would jot down baby M's milestones.  It turns out I don't remember to do it every night, but I manage once or twice a week to pull out the calendar and write down some notes.  I'll write things on specific days, like when she first smiled and laughed and rolled over, etc.  I also write notes for the week.  For example, last week I wrote across the whole week, "Rolling over in her sleep at night and doesn't like it!"  I keep track weekly of how many naps she's taking, when she has been going to bed, what she's been eating, and what her new developments are for the week.  I keep waiting to write, "started drinking from a bottle," but that hasn't happened yet!  This week I need to write that she loves it when I hold her and we chase 2 year old B around the house.  I've never heard her laugh so much as when we play chase!  

The calendar I use isn't super cute and looks really messy with all my notes written all over it.  I could have gone with a pretty notebook or planner, but it works for me and with this system I can write things down as I remember them and then someday I'd like to make a cute baby book that I can put all this info in.  I think if I didn't have the calendar by my bed I'd never remember to write anything down and since I can't remember things that happened an hour ago, I know I'd forget all those important milestones that happened during baby M's first year.  Thank you Connie and Katie for the great idea!!

Office Update

Waaay back in November, I wrote a post about how I wanted to organized an area in our downstairs.  It functions as a kind of everything space and it was a disaster!  If you want to read that post, click here.

Well, it's finished - almost!  There are a few little details to be taken care of - like labeling and filing, but the majority of the work has been done.  All I have to say is thank goodness for the playroom because just about every evening for the past few weeks Nick and I have taken the girls downstairs and they have been keeping busy playing (for the most part!) while we have been organizing away.

We got the IKEA EXPEDIT shelving unit and I love it!  It has just enough room to fit everything, but is small enough to force me to purge, and purge we did!  We donated, recycled, and threw away at least half of what was on the large and small bookshelves and the contents of our files.  I also moved some things around and got rid of a few pieces of furniture.

Are you ready to see what it looks like?  Here you go...

before:

after:

You'll notice there is no desk and that is because we decided that we really don't need one.  We both have desks at work, and TRY to keep our work at work.  My laptop and Nick's ipad go with us everywhere around the house so we didn't feel like we needed a place to keep them. If we need table space, we either use the dining room table or the kitchen counter.

Want another look?  Check it out...

before:

after:

I turned the back corner into a sort of bar area and since that is kind of Nick's domain, I added his replica high school helmet to give the corner a Nick feel.

Here's one more before and after...

before:

after:

Did you notice how the Keurig was on the wine fridge before?  I moved the utility cart to where the wine fridge is and made a coffee area. We keep the Keurig downstairs because we don't use it that often and it takes up too much space on the kitchen counter, but at least now there is room to make a cup of coffee when it does get used and to top it all off, there is room on the utility cart for when I need a little desk space.

Well, what do you think?  I'm loving it!  In a future post I'll explain how I organized all of the stuff we didn't purge so that I can find and file things easier, but here's a sneak peek at how I have decided to organize all the pens, notepads, paperclips, etc.

P.S. I just have to add this disgusting picture because look what I found making a home in the corner behind one of the shelves...

Yuck!!

Monthly Menu: No Bake Meals

Here is the timeline of events:

4 weeks ago - the oven (actually both ovens) stopped heating up

3 weeks ago - the repair man said the oven needed just a little part to fix it, then he called in to make sure the part was in and discovered the part isn't made for our oven anymore

2 weeks ago - after the Christmas craze it was time to start shopping for a new oven

this week - the oven was SUPPOSED to arrive, but apparently now it is on back order and won't be in until the 23rd!

So yep, that's right... we've been without an oven for about a month now and we still have a few more weeks to go.  If only it were summer and we could BBQ everyday!  We've had to really think hard about what we are cooking for dinner because we didn't realize how much we used our oven.  It seems like every meal we think of requires the use of an oven... ugh!

Here are just a few of the no-bake meals we have made over the past 4 weeks:

1. penne with homemade pesto*
2. breakfast (we did this a few times and switched it up between pancakes & breakfast sandwiches with fruit and turkey sausage as sides)
3. spaghetti and meatballs & broccoli
4. paninis & ceasar salad (pretty much our go to quick meal... we seem to make it once a week)
5. vegan white bean chili & tortilla chips (I usually make my own chips by baking tortillas, but since that requires the use of an oven, I was forced to indulge in some very oily and salty tortilla chips - yum!)
6. salmon (cooked on the stove), kale, & toasted bread
7. lemon chicken pasta
8. turkey tacos & peppers
9. green chili cheese soup (with another bag of chips... might as well milk this no oven thing for all its worth in the tortilla chip department)

Christmas breakfast - crockpot breakfast casserole (Thank you Amy for being a life saver and sending me this recipe!)

New Year's Eve dessert - chocolate chip cookie dough truffles (I also made these for some friends when we watched the Seahawks playoff game and decorated them with blue and green sprinkles.)

*I have to make homemade pesto because Nick is allergic to tree nuts.  I've come up with a pretty yummy one.  Here is the recipe:

1. heat 1/2 cup oil and 2 cloves of garlic on medium heat for 5 minutes
2. meanwhile, combine the following ingredients in the food processor and pulse until well mixed:

1/2 cup sunflower seeds

about 3 large handfuls of basil

1/2 cup parmesan

juice of 1 lemon

about 2 tsp of kosher salt

20 grinds of pepper

3. add the oil and garlic to the basil mixture and pulse until smooth (you may need to add a little more oil as you are pulsing to get the right consistency)

4. I usually add the pesto to penne pasta with feta and halved cherry tomatoes that I warm up in a little oil on the stove to make them softer for about 5 minutes...

The pesto is so easy to make that sometimes I will make an extra batch and freeze it for a really easy cooking night!

Hope this gives you some ideas for no bake meals.  I would love to hear if any of you have meals that you love that don't require the use of an oven... since apparently I have a few more weeks of no bake meals to go!!