Fall nesting??

I have had this wild hair up my butt lately to clean, clean and do some more cleaning. Is this was nesting is all about? I only thought people nested when they were pregnant... {and no im not preggo}. I remember I was cleaning everyday it seemed like once I hit my third trimester with my son. So bad I was down on the floor, scrubbing the grout with a toothbrush at 36 weeks ha!

For reals though, I think it's the changing of the seasons. In the summer I don't like to spend so much time inside, therefor I don't clean as much where as when the weather gets colder, the days appear more dreary and the sunlight only lasts so long, I think that is what sparks my 'nesting' to go into over drive.

Yesterday I spent 3hrs cleaning the bathroom.

WHO does that?!

I do apparently.

I started with the bathroom closet first. I have a love hate relationship with this closet. for the most part it has lots of room for everything but because there is so much room it's hard to keep everything completely organized on each shelf.

You like our ghetto curtain? i.e- towel hanging over a tension rod. I seriously have to think of something to do with that window. I tried the frosted glass {the valspar spray} but after about 3 showers, the frost started to chip off from the water and humidity from the shower and since our master bathroom is still being worked on, this is the only shower we can use.

So I pulled all the little caddies out, cleaned them, sprayed them with lysol and then put each product into a specific caddy as shown.

I know the 'Mama and Daddy' one makes us look like we have some 'issues' but don't worry. I usually throw any prescribed medicine out after im all better but Josh never throws it out. Some of that medicine is almost 4yrs old and hasn't been used in about.... oh 4yrs. BUT since Josh wasn't home, I didn't want to throw any of it out, would much rather wait for him to go through it and discard of what he doesn't need.

So all of our 'medicine' caddies I put on the very top shelf so I know little hands wont have any chance of getting to it {the actual medicine is also pushed all the way to the back}.

The second shelf has the insanely big towels, like beach towels... towels that don't get used regularly.

And since we don't have a formal linen closet, the bottom shelf has fitted sheets, top sheets, pillow cases and a blanket.

I had attached a little shelf to the inside part of the door awhile back and this is mainly used for the daily essential items that you saw in the ghetto shower/window pic. {shampoo, body wash, toothpaste... etc}.

I didn't stop there folks. Oh no sir-y.

The handles on the shower faucet have been bugging me because of that nasty grime you see the arrow pointing at.

Yuck.

So I popped the little caps off and unscrewed the actual handles.

Yum.

best. scrubber. ever.

end of story.

while the handles were drying, I decided to take the 80's style plate things that were on the inside of the caps, out.

I used my little exacto knife, dug a hole into the middle of the silver plate thing and popped it out. Then I scrubbed the inside of the cap.

All clean now!

That sonic scrubber I have? I also used that to scrub the chrome pieces of the faucet. They had some stained on water spots that wouldn't come off with a regular scrub/sponge, so I sprayed my cleaner on, let it sit and then used my sonic scrubber and 98% of the water stains came right off.

BUT I didn't stop there.

The wall to the right. the toilet wall... this wall is oddly long and very bare. I wanted to warm it up a little so I added some artwork.

It doesn't make the bathroom seem so cold now. That one little frame I had above the toilet in the 'before' photo just wasn't cutting it. Now it has more character and when you sit on the toilet, you can look at the mirror in front of you and have all of these lovely things to look at ....to pass the time you know.

kidding!

But that is what happens when you spend 3hrs cleaning a bathroom.

{for real... who does that!?}

Have you been nesting lately?

Keepin' it............. clean

How do you feel about messes? Do you despise them? Do you loooathe them? Or do you merely just shrug them off because for most normal people they really don't tend to get in the way of everyday things. Of course I probly should have elaborated on the word 'mess'.

As for me. I don't like them. I just don't, and no matter how many times I sweep, spray, wipe, wash or fluff no soon after I turn my back I have to do it all over again and with part of my analness I will continue to turn my back, do a complete 360 and go right back to fluffing and spraying all over again for I. dislike. clutter.

The following photos will show you how my house has looked all weekend. It's always these same rooms and since today is Monday and I was home from work, I decided to put my game face on and get down to the nitty gritty.

The Kitchen wasn't all that bad in the before photo but oh... don't let the sleek look of granite deceive you. Splotches, stickiness, random food product... you name it, it's there. After a good cycle of the dishwasher, counters scrubbed, stove top cleaned and anything that could possibly be sprayed and wiped off, was cleaned.

The Living room always gets hit the worse, as it should. This is the main hangout. The shin-dig, the heart of the home... [or is that the Kitchen?]... you get the idea. This room always has toys splattered all over the place. Toys everywhere don't bother me all that much but knowing how many times we walk through here, the thought of dirt getting onto said toys... is what bothers me.

 The Latrine. Since we do not have our Master Bath in full operation at the moment, this is the only other bathroom is the house and it gets used a lot... just ask Josh [ha!]. As you can see I added a fun little shower curtain up in the 'after' photo. I forgot I had bought that on sale awhile back @ Target, intended for something else but seeing as how our other shower curtain needed to be washed, I went ahead and just threw that one up for now.

...Oh and we really don't call our bathroom a 'Latrine' ;)

I should have shown you this photo first seeing as how we were making our way towards the end of the house but the bathroom photo Jayden was coming out [from using the potty, yay!] and when I took the hallway photo he was coming out into the hallway. I know, it really isn't all that big of a deal but I think it's cute.

This room....The before isn't even bad [that's because I organized a lot of his toys this weekend] but this room always puts Toys R Us to shame. Granted I typically don't mind Jayden throwing his toys all over the place but once it starts to get a little chaotic I have to come in and do some damage control. Mainly because I don't want him, for whatever reason, to wake up in the middle of the night, trip and hurt himself from all of the toys on the floor.

Of course once Jayden got word that his room was cleaned and organized he quickly ran in there, assembled himself and got to shouting his battle cry for toy carnage. I can only imagine what that room looks like right this very minute.

So there is my 'mess'. This isn't my attempt at 'keeping it real' because honestly, keeping it real for me is my OCD going into over-drive while I wash dishes, vacuum and wipe of little boogies and hand prints from the living room windows. I can thank good ol' Uncle Sam for my anal personality ;)

Organization 101 - Meal Planning and Freebies!!

I know it's been a few days since my last post... but with good reason! This post will surely make up for my little-tiny 'M.I.A-ness'. I don't know about you but one of my major resolutions for 2011 was organize our dinners. I wanted to create some sort of system. A meal plan system. You see, before I was always 'hey, what do you want for dinner?'... and would always end up with a quick and simple 'Um... I don't know' to which, in the end we would end up scraping through the cabinets only to make some pasta and red sauce... maybe with some turkey sausage. Well after 2010 ended I said to myself- 'Self... this year I want a plan. I am tired of the poor man meals. I want some scrumptious food and I am sure the entire family does as well'... and Self agreed.

Now of course im not knockin' the poor mans food. As you will see in this post... My meal plans are far from 'extravagant'. If anything they are quick, simple, easy and very much affordable. Of course without a plan it can be quite hard to create meals that fit into that 'Easy, quick and affordable' bracket [as I learned in 2010...heh...].

First, I bring out the stack of cookbooks. This isn't all of them but I could stand to lose a few so... the cooking light cookbooks are my favs. right now. Not only that, the majority, if not all, of the meals in these cookbooks are less than 30mins. for prep and cook. You might notice the weight watchers books. My step-mom is a weight watchers councilor... [or whatever you call them] and she hooked me up with all kinds of weight watcher books and goodies [step-moms are supposed to be 'evil' but seriously... mine is completely awesome!].

Note: Prep and cook-time on that soup. See?! Fast and easy [and healthy! :) ]

I run through the pages to look at what recipes I might want to add to our 2-week meal plan. As you can see... this one looks scrump-did-aly-umptious... and yes, it is on my meal plan for 2-7. And in case you weren't paying attention... if you look closely at the photo.. I pretty much gave you a recipe out of my cookbook :) ...but no that's not the freebie. The freebie I saved for last.

Some might think that cooking 'light' takes time and costs money. Well no... it doesn't. It can be just as quick as popping a frozen, loaded with salt and fake-ness, meal into the microwave and nuking it for 5mins. The photo above is for example. That's for a hearty fried chicken salad. Going by the 'light' recipe... you cut it down from 506 calories to 287 calories and in the end it's still tastes just as delicious as the 'original'.

As I find recipes I make my rough draft. I write down which recipes I will make on which corresponding day of the week.

Once I have all of my meals for 2 weeks, I take my bookmarks which are made out of some simple scrap paper and place them inside the page of my cookbook that the recipe is located.

As you can see the tops of my bookmarks have letters and numbers. Those letters stand for the day of the week and the numbers stand for which week. So if I have M-1, that basically tells me that, that recipe in which the bookmark is placed is for Monday of Week-1... and so on.

I write my Day-Numbers off to the side of my meal planning rough draft so I have something to go by when placing my bookmarks.

 Easy as pie!

Once I have my entire meal plan written out for my two weeks... I have to make my shopping list. I basically just go through the recipes and jot down items that I will need or think I might need. Some items I know for sure we already have, so of course I don't add those, but once my list is done I go food-shopping a-la my Fridge and cabinets. If I have something that I wasn't sure we had than I just cross it off the list.

 Once my final shopping list is complete, I type up a 'cleaner' version on Open-Office and print it out [FYI- Open Office is basically like Microsoft Office, but free].

While im at my computer printing off my typed up shopping list, I also print off 2 copies of my weekly dinner menus that I made up in Photoshop. Once those are printed off, I write down the meals [taken from my 'rough draft'] on each corresponding day of the week.

And last but not least is COUPONS! [and the crowd goes wild]. I basically just run through my coupons and go through which ones I will use for items on my shopping list and for any other 'etc' items I might buy while shopping [also depending if those 'etc' items are on sale]. This also gives me the chance to weed through expired coupons, or coupons that will expire before grocery day... to clean out my coupon holder.

And there you have it. My complete run down of how I plan meals for 2 weeks for my family. My busy family... I add my 2 dinner menu plans and shopping list to my clipboard. I hang my 'grocery' clipboard up on the wall in our newly organized office shelving nook. Once a new week starts, I take the first dinner menu off the clipboard and put it on the side of the fridge.

Josh has loved this whole concept. Now he doesn't have to ask me 'what's for dinner' anymore. He just reverts to the dinner plan to see what tasty goodness we will have cooked up for that night. But who cares what Josh thinks right!? It's time for some freebies!

Meal Planner 1

 Meal Planner 2

These are 2 meal planners that I made in Photoshop that I would like to share with you. All you have to do is click on the image, print, and Viola! They are sized 8.5x11, so you can easily save them to your files and re-size them if needed to.

And lastly... for what it's worth...I know when I talk about my new meal planning and grocery planning [complete with coupons] I get the 'Oh I don't have time for that' or 'How do YOU have time for that?!'. First and foremost.. you DO have time for it. I'm not trying to toot my own horn or anything [I really just wanted to say 'toot'... it makes me giggle], but I am up at 4:30 every morning [in case you were wondering why you might have seen comments from me at 5AM... that's during my little 'coffee break' during my morning rush... but I know, you really weren't wondering, but just in case you were ;) ] I am out the door by 5:35AM with Jayden in tow. 40min. commute to daycare and work. Work all day and than I am home a little after 5PM... so between two days off on the weekend and some sort of time I might find after work... I do fit in a grocery list, coupons and meal plan for 2 weeks [I go shopping every other Friday]. It's very much possible and it has really been a life saver for sure. Before I went all anal, I was always scrambling and trying to figure out what to make, only to end up making something -not so good for you- or eating out. My first two weeks of meal planning and coupons I saved $75.00 and go without having to stop at the store for two whole weeks [where as before we were usually stopping on the way home to pick up one or two things because I never followed a list or... a plan!].

Now what say you? Do you meal plan? Do you use coupons? If you don't meal plan have you ever wanted to try and start meal planning?

Organization 101 - DVD's/Games

Today I am going to show you how I astonishingly consolidated our entire DVD/Video Game collection [which consisted of a 4 shelf DVD rack which was stashed away in the closet... which has recently been turned into a storage haven for our Office] into a small, simple, white [DVD] storage box.

Here is what we started with. I had bought this DVD shelf about 5yrs ago because at the time we had at least 50 more DVD's than what you see in that picture. Over the years of course, in my attempts at organizing, we went through our collection and donated the DVD's we knew for sure we would never watch again, even if we wanted to, we more than likely wouldn't watch those particular DVD's, and we kept the ones that we would [most likely] watch again.

Que in the Space Saver. A simple, white storage box.

The first half of the box is sectioned off for movies. The card in the front is an inventory of the movies we have [also in the order they are placed inside the box] and also color coded by which type of movie...

For example-

Children's movies will be labeled in Purple. As you can see we have a lack of childrens movies. You would think we deprive our son from watching some good ol' Disney... however we have Netflix for our XBox and he watches a lot of childrens movies on that.

First up- Milo and Otis [You cannot have a childrens collection of movies without having Milo and Otis. It's just not humanly possible]. I printed off the labels and taped them to thick card-stock [for durability].

...On a curious Cat and a Pug nose pup.... Ooops. Sorry... got a little carried away there.

Movies are in order by the way they are shown on the inventory. TV Series are located behind all of the movies, in order, by season.

In the back is where the XBox games are located.

Same inventory concept as the movies. In order by color code.

For example- First up we have the LEGO's series games [love those!]. The first one is Indiana Jones...

And there it is behind the sleeve. I have also put the games in order for which they were released by date.

So there, in a nut shell, you have a look into how I took our entire DVD/Game collection and shrunk it down to fit into one small box.

Hello extra Space. Goodbye ugly DVD rack.
 
-And in case your wondering what we did with all of the empty DVD/Game cases.. Well not to fret my friends. Josh and I are true recycle addicts and we did NOT throw them in the garbage, however they can't be recycled because their made with different kinds of plastics, there for making them harder to melt down.. etc etc etc. So Josh is taking some to work to use for any programs that need some cases and the rest we are going to put an ad on Craigslist and Freecycle for anyone who wants them... [for free] :)


Do you have a DVD collection that desperately needs downsizing? Is organizing your DVD's/Games a 'to-do' on your organizing goals list for 2011?

The power of the Shelf

So the weekend is coming to a close... oh wait. Today is Monday. My B. See whenever I have the day off from work it throws me all out of whack and I always, always think it's still the weekend. -Although it does feel like Sunday.

So this weekend was pretty quiet for us on our end. We didn't get a whole lot done with the Bathroom [booo], however we did take a trip to Lowes to find a few odds and ends for the plumbing [caps and also the drain] and we also picked up a box of white subway tiles. One box comes with 100 tiles and we will need about 10 boxes total... since we pay everything with cash, we are going to buy a box here and there every so often until we have enough to complete the shower and also that will give us enough time to finish the other things that need to be done first with this project. -I also bought a sample of glass tiles for the floor. They are not the gray shade like in my mood board [found here] but they are a very light shade of blue. Very pretty... but im just not sure yet [stay tuned!].

This weekend however did consist of tackling some heavy duty organizing. Specifically with the office.

Here is what our office looked like before the overhaul. Not to bad, but not the greatest either. One area in particular that has always bothered me was the closet. And even though Josh and I had visions of turning the closet into this beautiful built in shelving unit [well maybe that was my vision and not so much Josh's.... but you get the idea]. The bathroom reno has pretty much taken over our wallets so the 'Beautiful built in shelving - complete with doors on the bottom' would have to wait. However we still needed something. Some type of shelves to organize our stuff because the way it is now was, just ain't gonna cut it.

So we came up with a compromise. We built 3 simple shelves. Attached them to the wall and painted the wall behind them, white, to try and make it look like one bookshelf unit.

Of course I have more plans for this room [like new desks and paint], but for the time being it's nice to finally have a 'go to' station of files, papers, bills... etc.

I also went out and bought some cheap-o Tupperware containers @ Wal-Mart [ick!!!!!], Family Dollar and KMart. I than printed off labels using Photoshop. Attached them to the containers for easy organizing.

I put Josh's nerdy IT books on the bottom shelf and used an old [open] container we already had to put a few of our music CD's [do people even listen to those anymore?] and computer programs... mostly Josh's programs and my Photoshop.

I consolidated all of our movies and games into this one white box [bought @ Target] for easy access. Stay tuned for a post on how I completed our Movie/Game organization overhaul!

I also picked up a few packs of file folders @ Target for $1.00 [I love their dollar isle!]. I than attached labels to them for our Active bills for the month, Paid/Inactive bills for the month, Insurance information that we get in the mail for the month [for work and for vehicles/house], a file for my College papers [more like passwords/student ID information and also receipts from my GI Bill when my Uncle Sam pays for class] and lastly is Josh and I's Veterans Affairs folder. We are constantly receiving information and letters from the VA Department and while most ends up getting filed in our fire-box, we file the ones we receive for the month in our VA File and since Josh and I are both Vet's, it can be a bit overwhelming with all of the incoming VA mail, but sometimes we get the same exact letters just addressed to each of us [like a standard type of letter] and in that case one of us will shred one [because it has our social #'s on them] and file the other one.

Overall I feel relieved and like a giant weight is off my shoulders. I am happy that everything has either been thrown out, shredded, filed or donated. I am also relieved that we tackled this project so quickly [I mean it's still January! Double W00T!].

And because I was feeling a little creative hair up my be-hind, I created this nifty little 8x10 [on photo paper] in Photoshop. I am sure you have seen those 'I love you Blogs and Coffee' photos rolling around the web. I think their great... however I really REALLY love coffee and so I wanted to dedicate one special frame and wall to the creamy, sweet liquid that wakes me up every morning and get's me going. I'm not sure what I would do without it!

So there you have our organization overhaul of the office. Of course, like I mentioned earlier... the office isn't no where near completion, but I am happy that we have finished organizing our papers and files and maybe now with a fresh start in the new year, we can easily keep on top of our filing and organizing without becoming overwhelmed, like we used to because we had no sort of system set up.

How about you... Have you done any organizing for the new year? Do you plan on doing any organizing projects or are you just one of those ultra-smart people than can file anything, mentally, right in their own mind? :)