Organization — Linen Storage when you have no Linen Closets

Of course it came from Ikea! This was one of our first purchases when we went last November.

It sits on the second floor loft, which is a central location for all the kids. Our towels are kept on the shelf in our master closet, right off of the master bathroom.

I can't keep towels and washclothes under my bathroom sink. It gives me the heebie-jeebies. I'm funny that way. Sounds better than saying weird, too. So that area is limited to all the other things in a bathroom that need to be put away — cans, bottles, hair dryer, etc. — everything except toilet paper. I can't keep it under there either.

Go ahead and call me weird.

This is where we keep most of the extra bedding and pillows. It's on a back wall in the rec room. I've tried putting folded sheets between the mattress and box springs, but unless you barely fold them, it makes the mattress all lumpy and lopsided.

Our kids only have one set of sheets, so they get washed, dried, and put right back on. It saves money because I don't have to buy more sheets and storage space because I don't have to find a place to put them. My kids also don't like to use the flat sheet. They'd rather just use a blanket or duvet. I think they're weird, too.

But I'm not saying which side of the family I think it came from.

Crochet

When my parents came for a visit several weeks ago, one of the things on our agenda was for Chatty to get crochet lessons and for me to get crochet refreshers from my mom.

First off, here is the final product of Chatty's lessons:

Her grandma made the yellowish one, and she made the bluish one.

Here she was getting started with her lessons.


I can personally vouch that sticking out your tongue helps during pressure-filled moments.

And they're still smiling!

That's a good thing, because Chatty's a leftie, and we're all righties. She tried to do it with her left hand and decided she liked it better with her right hand. She crocheted that whole purse with her right hand!

I'm still working on the product of my lessons (except I did do some scarflets). Here's my big project in process:

You can tell it's an afghan, right?

Every 10 rows I put in a row of the fluffy variegated blue. I'm about 30 rows from being done.



That blue is my worst nightmare. My mom told me how to sort of fluff it after I stitch it in, and my OCD gets the best of me when I'm doing it. I really don't like using that fluffy yarn anymore, even if I do love how it looks.

Next one I make will get pretty colors, but not fluff.

This post is linked to Show and Tell Friday hosted by Kelli at There is no place like home.

Laundry Quandry

This was my laundry baskets after all the clothes and towels from upstairs were brought downstairs.


I only have three baskets, and then the one for towels, undies, and socks. If I had more room, I'd have more.

The three baskets are used as follows: one is for light-colored clothes, one is for dark-colored clothes and jeans (unless of course the jeans just get separated out in the first place on the floor like they are in this picture), and one for clothes that are washed on a more delicate cycle.

Now get this...this doesn't even include bedding!

I usually don't let it get this backed up, but it does happen occasionally. I was trying to figure out how many loads I do in a week. I'd estimate between 13 and 15 without any bedding, they are usually full loads, and I have a big washer capacity. That's a lot of laundry!

When I was on bed rest with the girls, I missed doing laundry. I decided then and there that I would never complain about laundry again. I don't like it when it's backed up, but I don't mind doing it.

I also don't let people in the house help me with it. I like things folded a certain way, hung up a certain way — I think it's something I can control and that's why I like it so much. Obviously has to be something OCD!

Soon my girls will be doing their own laundry, not mixed with mine of course. But they need to learn. I guess they'll find out when they read this post.

You'll know they know when you hear the moans and groans from afar.

Shower Time = Creative Thinking Time

At least for me it does. Please tell me I'm not the only one out there.

I choose to use my time thinking, not singing. I suppose it's because I can't sing well. I'm not sure if that means I think well.

The day my parents were coming to visit, I went through a long thought process in my head while I was taking a shower. See, whenever we have guests, they stay in Chatty's bedroom up on the third floor, which gives them a little privacy and also their own bathroom.

Well, about the time my in-laws left in January, we were putting up towel rods and fixtures. You know, since we'd been in the house for about a month and a half. I've shown you before, but this is what it looked like over Chatty's toilet.

These are items that I found 'wandering' in Ikea in their kitchen area, and they are fantastic solutions for our childrens' bathrooms. For the bath towel, we had to go back at a later date and get another short rod, since I guessed at the size and the longer one was too big (these are both short rods over her toilet; the other kids' bath has a short rod and a long rod).

The thing is, only one bath towel will fit on it well. I knew it was going to be tricky for my parents to both hang up their bath towels on that rod, so what was I to do?

And just as a little aside, this rod, or really anything else, wasn't up when my in-laws visited. I have no idea what they did.

So I remember these hooks I bought to go over the rods to hold hairbrushes. Except that when we tried to hang the hairbrushes they stuck straight out because the holes weren't the right size. I've had these little hooks sitting in a basket since then with pretty much no purpose. Until now.


Genius, wasn't it?!

Just in case you missed the earlier posts on my kids' bathrooms, here's a picture of the other one.

So are you a thinker or a singer?

My Middle Name is Resourceful

Well, it should be. I don't really like my middle name anyway.

We're having our garage sale this week. Here in our area, you start them on Thursday. If you don't, you miss out, because apparently that's the big day. And since we are having a subdivision-wide yard/garage sale, I'm having it on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from 9 until 4. I don't think I've ever had one past 2:00 in the afternoon, and I usually close up at noon. I'm breaking out of my shell.

I'm also having a garage sale with four tables. How do you have a garage sale with four tables? You get really resourceful, hence the new middle name.


29 large U-Haul boxes later, I have makeshift tables lining the entire fringe of my garage. To make them look a little nicer, I put tablecloths on them, then when I ran out I used a couple of flat sheets.

Mulitiple uses? Maybe I should let U-Haul know.

Here we are Wednesday evening just prior to the subdivision pre-sale.


Of course the last couple of days are when it's finally warmed up and felt like summer. But I don't care too much — it's no worse than anywhere else we've been, it's short-lived, and I know I'll have a lot less stuff in my garage when this is done.

It's Even Bigger Than I Thought

Here it is...look very big to you?

I laid the Ikea paper tape measure over it and took a picture. Good thing we went on a Tuesday night when there weren't many people there. I should have worn a little name tag that said, "Hello, my name is Kayren. I blog. If you see me take any weird pictures, that's why."

So if you read any blogs out there and they talk about the weird people they saw in the Canton, Michigan, Ikea, it was probably us. Unless their people have colored or unnaturally positioned hair, tattoos, or piercings, then it's someone else.

Okay, so here's the measuring taking place:

I tried to get Hubby to lie down beside it for effect, but he wouldn't. There was no way I would, because I wasn't going to let my hair touch the floor where people's shoes that might have been in a bathroom had walked. He let me very quickly snap this as he picked up the tape measurer.

And just notice that the perfect purse in spring green even looks good when a Hubby is holding it for you.

Now because I don't think you can read those little numbers in the pictures, here is the end of the tape measurer up close:

Those circles are 34"! And I've missed them every time. Every single stinkin' time! Walked against the flow of traffic just as happy and oblivious as you please.

Tuesday night, I went counter-clockwise with the flow of traffic the way the arrows pointed. Hated every minute of it. I felt completely disoriented and confused. I kept thinking I was almost done with the top floor and it kept going. I couldn't tell exactly where I was (halfway through, middle, far wall, etc.). I told Hubby I will not do that again. He thinks I just need to keep practicing, but I don't really think I'm going to get him back enough times to practice.

I was so stressed out by it all I almost forgot the main thing I went for by the time I got to the bottom floor in the self-serve furniture area. If it hadn't been for Hubby I would have, and that's sad, because we'd passed his hour and a half limit and he wasn't doing so well, plus he'd just dropped a box in the middle of his foot. Being thrilled at being at Ikea, the only explanation was having gone the wrong way upstairs.

So I didn't twitch, but internal disturbances are much worse.

Much Better!

Don't the towels look so much better in this picture


than they did in this picture I showed in the post on organizing my kids' bathrooms?


I thought so, too.

But folding them that way was a little like putting my underwear on backwards. It was totally foreign. I kind of got twitches while I was doing it.

Seeing that nice smooth edge on those towels will keep me living on the edge though.

Did You Realize The Extent Of My Organizational OCD?

Do you guys have those fusible beads running around your house? You know, the ones that often come in a big mixed up jar like this one:

You put them on some cute shaped board

or if you are one of my experienced fusible-beading kids, you can use the large interlocking squares and come up with your own designs. Then you can pray you get it ironed before it gets bumped and messed up. You'd think I speak with years of experience.

I do! Two year olds can stick a bead up their nose and still breath through the hole in it, so you might want to watch out for that age-warning thing on the package. Plus the ability to breath through the hole makes it much more difficult for said Buddy to blow the bead out of his nose.

After years and years of children loving these beads and making masses of projects and me ironing them while I silently cursed the invention of them, because I've ironed more bead projects in my life than I've ever ironed clothes, I found out some things about fusible beads.

You can get them in single color packages! I found them on the internet, because let's face it, I think you can find anything there. I'm going to give you the link in case you have bead-crazed kids and didn't know this, and the company doesn't have a clue I'm doing it. Their name is KoolStuff4Kids, and I think they have a separate place you can go if you have Sculpey-clay obsessed kids.

But my favorite thing — if you purchase nine bags of beads, you get a free container for sorting. One bag of beads fits perfectly in three sections front to back.

Now I think you can buy these to your heart's content at Wal-Mart and places like that, and I think I actually did get a few of mine there. But if I'm buying nine bags anyway, I like free stuff. So here is where all the bead boxes are stored:

and here is a view of four of them up close and personal:

I have been known to take a spoon and move a row of beads over to fit a new color in that is between two shades we already have. You don't need to say anything. I already know. And in case you are wondering why there seems to be a darker row down by the lightest color and think I'm losing my mind, they are slightly different. They are *clear* beads, like transparent, so they sit off by themselves. There really is a method to my madness.

In concern that you couldn't see the nifty tweezers they make to help you in beading, I took an up-close picture:

We do use them occasionally to help us move beads around on a board, but they are very helpful in getting the stray beads out of the other sections when they seem to run amok. They need to be used to get that white one out of the red box.

You might think this organization drives my kids crazy. Really, when you buy the beads and put them straight into the boxes, there is nothing to it. As long as you make sure your box closes, experience speaking, it is a simple method to use. My kids love not having to dig around to find the colors they need, knowing if they have enough for the project they want to make, etc.

Just to finish up, here is how we store our pegboards:

This is the two smaller baskets a little closer. They contain all the large interlocking squares and other large boards, and the second one has all the larger animal boards.

We throw all the other smaller boards into that third larger basket. We also have a lidded bin that we keep our extra bags of beads in that we've ordered and don't have room for in the organized boxes, but I figured if you'd stuck with me this far, you'd heard and seen about all you wanted regarding fusible beads.

This is the one craft project that all my kids have enjoyed since we bought the first ones about ten years ago. They now make a larger bead for smaller kids to join in the fun, and probably so they don't fit up a nose.

Organization — Spices

A couple of weeks ago I showed you one of my favorite rooms, my kitchen. In that post I also showed you my spice drawer. Here is what it looked like:

I could find everything relatively quickly, and it was sort of alphabetized.

I had to buy some new spices this week, and I also desperately needed to replace some old ones. Using those old Tupperware spice containers worked great while Hubby was in the military and we moved around, because that way the movers would actually take them. But the down side of that was that there was never an expiration date since the bottle got thrown away. I knew they needed to be replaced though, so I did.

In doing so I analyzed my drawer to figure out what would work better. I didn't want the bottles in the drawer without being inside of something, so I had to figure out what would work best. Two of the glass bottles fit nicely in the smaller rectagular basket that you can get 3-for-$1 at Wal-Mart. After a Wal-Mart run, emptying out the old spices, and rearranging the drawer (including alphabetizing), this is what it looked like:

See, alphabetized:

I also keep my paper muffin cups, plastic measuring cups, slicer thingy, toothpicks, etc. in here. Baking/cooking related stuff. I kept the taller plastic basket for some items because it fit the space best and I really needed the higher sides for those things.

So I didn't get the fancy-schmancy spice drawer organizer I thought I might, and I didn't get the one I love that goes up in the cabinet either. But you sure can't beat about $3 in plastic baskets.

Organization — Manuals and Booklets

Several years ago when we lived in Illinois, I got an idea that I think was from Martha Stewart. That is in the recesses of my mind, because I didn't watch her show and I don't read her magazine, but the tip must have been credited to her somewhere.

I got a huge honkin' binder, and the most awesome two-side pocketed, extra-durable plastic tabbed three-ring inserts. I use them in some other binders, and they are just heavenly. I get a little verklempt about them.

So these pockets I used for my manuals and a few instruction thingamajigs I didn't want to lose that I would categorize with a manual, and would therefore know exactly where to look for them when necessary. Instead of writing on the tabbed inserts (where I would have to change them whenever there was rotation of some kind), I just used my labelmaker and then stuck it directly on the outside of the tab. See:


Front and back view:


This was a four-inch binder. Do you see how thick that puppy was?


Now the thing is, I rarely had to get into that binder, and it took up a lot of space. And when I did need to get into it, it was a little cumbersome. By not getting into it often, there were usually a lot of things to throw away by the time I did.

So I went through this binder the other night, and this was my throwaway stack:


and this is all I was left with:


Target has these fantastic little boxes by Sterilite now that fit regular sized paper (as well as a few other sized boxes) and I am hooked! Look at this:


Okay, yes, I do still need to use my labelmaker, but I just couldn't resist going ahead and showing you what I'd been up to. The top box is the one you saw in the picture above, the second one has all the manuals and warranties from our new appliances with this house, the third one has all the electronic kind of "stuff" that came with our computer, cell phones, ipods, digital cameras, etc., and the fourth box has the Ikea instruction books and the extra pieces that we didn't use during assembly (like wall anchors and stuff). I have all those loose things in a big Ziploc baggie inside the box so they don't go all helter-skelter in there.

Here's another stack — I told you I was hooked!


The top two boxes have the kids' Monster Jam yearbooks that they've taken to the events and had autographed by whoever was there. These books have been my nemesis until a couple of days ago. The bottom box has all the Thomas the Tank Engine track layouts and yearbooks they used to give out in the stores with more track layouts. We're working on future favorite grandparent status here, so these will live with us forever.

Here's a little peek at how they look on the cubbies.


I'll show you the entire thing later, but the set of three boxes is at the opposite end on the same row. Because it had to be symmetrical. And yes, to be perfectly symmetrical I need another box. I'm working on it. I just haven't been back to Target.

You remember the OCD issues, right?