Day # 9 Toy Organization - Going from Ugh to Wow!

Day 9 on my organizational challenge is toy organization. I was going to put this off for as long as possible but since it was today's challenge, I decided to go ahead and plunge in. It took hours. See why...





So obviously in addition to an organizational problem, I also have a cleanliness problem. I admit that I am not as good as getting the kids to pick up as I should be. Part of the problem is that my solution to cleaning up the rest of the house is to gather up all their toys and dump them in their room without putting them away. Now that I have it cleaned up though. It's easier to keep it clean and I will also soon be rolling out a kids clean system involving their specific tasks written on craft sticks and me handing out the craft sticks to the kids to complete the task.

Here is after..What's that you see? I think other people call it a FLOOR. Who knew this room even had one! In corresponding order to the before pictures...



So where DID all those toys go? Well one of my secrets is that the closet in this room has a chain lock on the top. And Chris built shelves for the closet and there are many trucks, bins, hats, puzzles, etc that live in the closet and I have control over what comes out. I don't like a free for all on the toys. I have too many for that.




Organization FAIL..We got this under the bed storage unit. Seemed like a good idea at the time. There is all that space under the bed after all. But it's horrible. The dividers are weird and have a gap at the bottom and once you open the whole thing, it becomes like those bins (see before pic #1..I hate those too and put them in the other kid's room) where they just dump every toy. So because I can't get to the store to buy a shelving unit to hold a bunch of cutely labeled plastic boxes, this will have to do for now.



Stay Tuned...today's challenge was laundry organization to which I decided to take on as getting every single piece of laundry in the house done and put away including all the little quirky things that have been in the laundry room for months because I just haven't gotten a chance to deal with them (i.e. some curtains that need to be bleached and an electric blanket with annoying instructions). This challenge is going to take two days for me. So more tomorrow!

Day # 6 Get organized - Dresser drawers

I am obsessed with organization blogs. It's what I do when I am on much needed back breaks from the actual organizing. I wish I still knew which blog it was from but I had clicked through from a blog where I am doing my challenge and I don't remember which one it was. But I have brand new way of organizing the clothes in drawers and I love it! I started on my own drawers but no pictures of transformation there. I then moved onto Peter who has wayyy too many clothes stuffed into his drawers.

Here is the before picture of his pants drawers. And yet somehow I managed to get it closed every time. This isn't all his pants though. Sometimes I leave them on top of the dresser.



And this is the after of the pants drawer. The lady's secret trick..at least for shirts and I applied them to pants..is to fold them over one more time and put them side by side instead of on top of each other. So now they are nicely organized by style and the great thing about this method is I don't have to search through any other pants to find the one I want. I just grab what I want. The other great thing about this is when I am stuff more pants in, I squish them more rather than adding to the top where it causes the drawer to go all haywire and messed up. I did learn though that cords don't roll well so they are still folded the old way. This includes the laundry that needed to be put away so it is about 5 more pants than the before photo!



And here is the after of the shirts drawer. You can see I still have more space for even more shirts. Peter (age 3) also thought this was very cool because he got to look at all the designs of his shirt before he picked out the trucks one that he wanted to wear that day.


Stay tuned...I think tomorrow is under the kitchen sink day! Or maybe the pantry..I need to see what I am going to eat for the rest of the snow days since I didn't go to the store. :)

Day # 4 & 8 Get organized - Coat Closet/Linen closest

I am doing an organization challenge over at A bowl full of lemons.

Day 7 was the linen closet and Day 8 was the coat closet. I don't own a coat closest but we do have a junk closet that shares space with some clothes and shelves that contain our linens. We have a linen closet but we don't use it because of the cats. :( So I decided to tackle this closet today and I was surprised that it didn't take me as long as I thought. That's because practically everything I touch is getting thrown into a box for goodwill. So far for 2011, I am up to 8 boxes.

The Before picture of the junk portion



The Before picture of the linen closet portion


The after portion..probably could still stand to purge some hangers but still it's an improvement!






And the after of the linen closet. I purged a lot of linens but mostly I just re-folded a bunch of them. My only complaint is that it's really hard to fold mattress covers and king sized sheets and make them look pretty. But it's the linen closet after all so who cares!