Spring Cleaning or 2 hrs Sweatin' in the Bathroom

Recently, I have been on a spring cleaning kick and have been slowly working my way through my house (see here).  After cleaning my living room, I decided to tackle the bathroom next.

When I clean a room, I always take two paper bags with me.  On the bags I write a giant "G" and "D" and fill them with either GARBAGE or DONATIONS as I clean.  I began with the medicine chest.  After disposing of all the old lotions, soaps and body sprays, I found some cute containers to hold items such as bandaids, q-tips, and flossers.  

I keep bandaids in that cute metal box!

Since my bathroom has no closet, (nor are there closets anywhere in my house besides the bedrooms) I purchased a tall pantry from Home Depot.  I adjusted the shelving inside of it to hold large bins where I store my towels and sheets.  There was even room on top of the pantry to hold an extra bin of sheets!

I even attached a toilet paper holder and towel rack to the side of the pantry!

I found some great large storage bins at Target to store towels and sheets!

To organize my sink, I placed all extra toiletries underneath of it including a bin of washcloths.  I store a roll of paper towels, spray and lightbulbs under there as well.  I stuck a wire suction cup basket to the wall near the sink to corral my hair dryer, saline solution and to hang my glasses on!

My final organizational touch in my bathroom is a small coat rack.  I especially love this item because it keeps the towels off of the floor and gives me a place to hang my robe or outfit for the day.

Have you started your spring cleaning yet?

spring cleaning

In honor of spring, I have been doing some spring cleaning.  I definitely did not want to spend my entire spring break cleaning my house, so I have been focusing on one small area of my house at a time.  I decided that the first area of cleaning focus would be my living room, since this is the place everyone sees the most of.  I started by cleaning all the extras off of my ladder bookshelf.  

A ladder shelf is great because not only can you place items on the shelves, you can also place items on the floor behind the shelf and no one can even see what's behind there!  On my ladder shelf, I placed three storage bins.  One holds small games, one holds books and one holds nothing currently, but will be a great place to quickly stash stuff when company is coming! 

I also placed a small wine rack on one of the shelves to store magazines. 

The top shelf holds pictures and the shelf just below that holds my dvd player and satellite receiver.

What do you think?  I am feeling better already!

Go- Go Garage Clean-up

My next organization project for the summer was to organize my garage!  
This time I remembered to take before pictures, but I am embarrassed to show them!  

See! It was a mess before!  All year long, I just dump stuff in there!


The first thing that I did was to take everything off of the workbench and out of the cabinets.  I painted the workbench blue and and while that was drying went through all of my bins to see what was inside and labelled them.  

My Summer Blue workbench

The next thing I did was to cut a peg board down and place that behind the workbench.  I put pegs in the board and hung up my tools.  Then I corralled all of the junk into bins and labeled them "wires", "car", "paint", "garden", "beach" etc...  I also added a little basket with mailing envelopes and a gift wrap bin so that I can wrap gifts on the workbench when I need to.  On the front of the workbench, I attached a plastic window box that never really worked out for the window to store my drill and other tools!

Pegboard with tools

Beach bin, sports bin and window box for tool storage

I also set up a craft center on the other side of the garage for my crafty little daughter to hang out and create things.  

Craft center

Last, I hung up all of my garden flags on a shelf that was already hanging on the opposite wall near where I keep the (now overflowing!) garbage and recycle bins.  

Even the flags are organized!

 So, what do you think???

Curtain deja vu

Since I am a teacher and single mom, the months of April, May and June are usually focused on simply surviving end of the year testing, exams, and the end of the school year in one piece!  That said, I have all kinds of projects that I have been working on around my house, and that I have planned to tackle this summer.  

Over two months ago, I purchased some curtains for my front windows.  I had icky blinds up there that had discolored, and that I didn't care for too much that came with the house.  I pried and tugged at those things and could not get them down, so I ended up just hanging the curtains over top of them.  I don't think you can tell and I absolutely love the way the room looks now.  

I finished organizing my pantry yesterday, finally hung the curtains up this morning, and moved on out to the garage, which is my next project.  It was nice because it was rainy all day long, and not 100 degrees for once, so I would work for a few hours, then take a little break, then work some more.  When I was taking a break, I was admiring the new curtains and all of a sudden it hit me like a bolt of lightning-

No wonder I like them so much, they are almost exactly the same as my bedroom curtains!!!  The crazy thing is that I bought them at two different stores years, and I bought the bedroom curtains a few years ago!  I guess it is best to go with what you know, whether consciously or subconsciously!

Pimpin' out the Pantry

My first project of the summer was to organize my pantry.  It is the only closet in the entire downstairs of my house, so I wanted to try to make it so that I can cram even more crap in there a more functional space!  I was so eager to get started that I took absolutely no "before pictures", and just started throwing everything from the pantry into a box and all over my kitchen counters.  I then Googled, measured, and carefully created a list of the organizational items I would need to purchase.  I decided to try to brave Ikea just one more time (the last time I walked in there my mind went blank, I was overwhelmed by the size and amount of stuff in the place, and I took a lindenberry drink and hightailed it out of there!)  

Well, when I got to Ikea yesterday, I realized I had left my list at home and was shocked to find that Smaland would only watch my kid for 45 minutes.  45 minutes!!!  

So, I dragged my poor friend through the store at a break-neck pace and stuffed our bags full of everything organizational I could find.  We had only gotten through about half of the store when I had to run back to the Smaland to beg for more time.  They gave me another half hour.  Have you seen this store???  It practically took me a half hour just to get back to where I left off!  

So, I figured out where we left off and continued running through the store grabbing stuff left and right, and next thing I know, the Smaland buzzer goes off.  Surely this must be a mistake, I thought, I have 16 and a half more minutes left- so I ignore the buzzer.  A few more minutes go by and they PAGE me over the LOUDSPEAKER!  Well, I started to panic a little as I run back through the maze to see what the deal is, and when I got back to Smaland, my daughter told me that she had them call me because she was bored and needed some meatballs to eat!  Yeah, me too kid, me too!