Kitchen Project–One Lower Cabinet Started!

 

This past weekend I took some time to start sorting one of the lower kitchen cabinets.  I’ve been working right along on the upper cabinets, switching things up with relative ease, but I’ve been putting off the lower cabinets because they are such a mess… But, I decided to take the plunge and get started.  This is going to be my cooking center/sink center overflow area, that’s the goal anyway!

The first thing I did was haul everything out of the cabinet, sorting as I went into two piles:

1. Things I use all the time (every week or more often)

2. Things I use rarely.  These items were going to be moved to my kitchen overflow section in the crawlspace.

I had just a few things to get rid of, I added those to our overflowing pile of donations/garage sale stuff in the garage.

I was AMAZED at how much stuff was in this cabinet and how dirty it had gotten!  I can’t believe how much I had shoved in there!   Our often used items pile was pretty small: electric skillet, battery charger, toaster, blender, crockpot, pitchers, olive oil, and cooking spray.  They fit back into the cabinet with plenty of room to spare!

And our rarely used pile, things I still use but only a few times a year: stockpot, electric knife, tea tray, crystal serving bowl, cake stand, and a few corningware pans.  (Obviously the baby toys didn’t come out of the cabinets, ha!)

I’m still tweaking it up, but I’ll post before and after pics later, when the kitchen is done.  Something to look forward to!  :-)

Kitchen Organization Project

This month I’ve been working on getting my kitchen reorganized in order to waste less steps.  I became convinced of the need to do this after reading this book.  It’s been an interesting process so far!  I never realized how much time I spent running around my kitchen till I read the book.  I’m not done yet, but I thought you all might like to see some before shots.
Here’s my pantry.  It has been getting more and more messy, especially since Malachi was born.  I also have a pantry in the garage for my stock pile of good deals.  I have quite a few things that we don’t use anymore that are just taking up space and I really think I could make better use of this space.
 
Here are my upper cabinets.  (Yes, this is all of them, my kitchen is small!)  These are not that messy, but again, I think I could do better as far as making my organization make sense.  Letter supplies, cold medicine, and cake pans all in the same cabinet?  What was I thinking?!  :-)

Lower cabinets.  This is where most of the mess and disorganization is.  I really need to figure out some good place for all of this stuff!

Finally, my drawers.  There are a couple more but I forgot to get pictures of them.  But, you’re not missing much, it’s more of the same.  Stuff, stuff, and More stuff.  It’s time to do something about all of this junk!

Keep checking back, I’ll be posting updates as I get things organized!  My goal is to finish this up by the end of April!

To see my first progress, click here. 

Meal Plan for the Week

 

One of my recent blog finds is Life as Mom.  I love her menu plans! I love to see what she is serving for HER family of 8!  Since that is one of my all time favorite posts from her I thought you all might enjoy the same from me.  :-)

I like to plan my meals about a week in advance.  I have done as far ahead as a month, but in my current life stage planning a month ahead just feels impossible!

 

I plan my meals in 3 steps:

1. Check the fridge for foods that need to be used up.

2. Check the pantry and freezer for foods on hand.

3. Check my lists of meals for ideas and make a list of meals for the week.

Pretty simple really.  I usually use what ever I have on hand, I don’t like to have to buy ingredients special for a meal.  The hardest part for me is thinking about side dishes!

 

Here is my meal plan for this week:

* Beans and Rice with lettuce, tomatoes, olives, cheese, green peppers and sour cream for toppings.  Fruit Salad.

* Salsa Verde Beef served in tortillas with lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, and sour cream.  I don’t make side dishes with this kind of meal anymore because my family doesn’t eat them!

* BBQ Chicken, steamed vegies, cut fruit.

* Easy Manicotti (ie: recipe made up as I go!), green salad, fruit salad.

* Homemade Pizza, green salad.

*Snacky Dinner (bread, cheese, fruit, vegies) – A meal in one so to speak!

* Shrimp!  A special treat from the freezer that I forgot I had!  Green salad.  Or this might end up being smoothies, depending on how busy the day is, ha!

What’s on YOUR menu this week?

Family Room

After swallowing a hard dose of cold reality, I realized that the chances of painting the family room before this little guy is born were extremely slim.  So, I went ahead and rearranged all the furniture and got the room set up the way I wanted.  It is still kind of rough, there's no decorating done or anything like that but the set up seems to be very workable for us.  We have done school quite a few times and found it to be ideal.  Also, with the kids toys where they are at, the little ones can play quietly with toys right next to us while we do school!

In this picture you can see how it's set up.  The computer desk works so well under the window!  Next to it is the turtle tank in the corner, then the school shelves, then a dresser full of all our games (we like to play games, so we have a lot of them), and finally the toy shelves.  We bought a new tank for Elijah's frogs and put them on top of the game dresser.

Here are the school shelves.  I went through the school stuff somewhat as I put it on but I need to do more sorting and organizing as I can.  All our picture albums, baby books, etc are on the top shelves.  I also put all the art supplies (paper, glue, scissors, playdough, etc.) on these shelves.  Our library books occupy one shelf (2nd shelf from bottom, left side) and our kid books are on the next shelf down.  I'm always amazed at how much school/kid/art stuff there is!

And here are the toy shelves.  I did a major sorting of all the toys when I set up this shelf.  No, these are not all the toys, we still have 7-8 bins of toys in the garage as well as oversized toys that I switch out on a daily basis.  The toys that made it onto these shelves are the ones that are played with consistently on a daily basis.  There's also a box of weapons next to the shelves on the left that you can't see in this picture.

I would still like to work in a bookshelf just for books, but I'm not sure where yet.  Maybe in the corner by the game dresser?  I also want to build some shelves to hang above the toy shelves to put 3D art that the kids make on, and hang up a bulletin board to display all the drawings the kids make.  But for now, I'm very happy with how this worked out!

Switching out clothes, part 2

So, I just realized I never updated ya'll.  I did switch out all the clothes for the kids, about 3 weeks ago.  It is always an all day job for me, and then some.  The kids were a big help this year, transferring clothes up and down the stairs for me, folding clothes and putting it away, and just generally doing whatever I asked them to do.  It has been sooo warm here that the summer clothes have been in constant use, although I left out some cold weather clothes too, and they have been used some.

These are all our bins of clothes.  I have two for next seasons clothes, and 1 for clothes that we're keeping but which won't be worn next season (ie: next summer, etc.).  I also have a small bin of baby clothes for each gender, not much because I got rid of all the boy clothes that I was so tired of, and I don't have much girl clothes because, well, I've only had 1 girl!  I also have a small bin for off season coats, and one bin of shoes.  It's always sooo much work to haul these out of the crawlspace and go through it all!  I'm so glad it's done!

Success!

Our garage sale went MUCH better than expected!  We ended up making $240 and my mother-in-law made almost $100!  I'm so happy with how it went!

Mark made this clothing rack for me last year and it works so well!  It really helps to move the clothes, a hard item to sell, by making it easier for people to find what they want.  I sort all the clothes by size and have paper dividers to make it easier for my customers.

I also try to keep like items together, creating a "kitchen" section, "decor" section, etc.  All the big stuff I place on the side where it's easy to see and will hopefully make people want to stop.  By the end of Friday most of the big stuff was gone though... not really a bad thing!

There were a few toys that the kids didn't want to part with but I wanted gone.  This Dora game was one of them...it ended up in the house more than once before being sold!

Emmaline was my big helper at the paying table, she helped me hand out change to all our customers.  She is wearing a hat and coat because Friday morning it was only 50 degrees till late in the morning.

I take all the little toys that are too small to sell alone and I make "grab bags".  These sell really well, especially with 7-12 olds.

All in all it was a GREAT sale!  After it was all said and done we took all the leftover items to Goodwill, so our garage is much cleaner!  Yay!!!

Home Sweet Home

I follow several blogs and recently on one of them they posted pictures of their house and how it looks on an "everyday basis".  I was so encouraged to see her home that I thought I would post pictures of my home to try and encourage others like I was.  It's so important to remember that our home needs to reflect us and how we keep it up needs to be what works for us and not others.  I am at the point where I finally have a level of cleanliness that I can live with and manage and I am HAPPY with.  So, here it is, our home...

 In the mornings I always have a stack of dirty dishes on the counter from breakfast.  I do all the breakfast and lunch dishes together after lunch, with help (Emmaline unloads the dishwasher).  At dinner time, Mark loads the dishwasher and I wash the remaining dishes by hand.  There is almost always dishes drying on the right hand side of the sink, because I hate to dry dishes!

 Our "dining room", not really a dining room per se but you get the idea.  The bookcase is where we keep all our school stuff and we "do school" at the table.  The table was recently given to us by some friends and I haven't gotten around to finishing painting the chairs so they all match.  Someday...

 This is what you see when you first come into our house.  I try to keep the living room clean at all times and have a "no toy" policy in the living room.  Which works sometimes, if I keep on top of the kids.

 And here is the family room, where we actually live and where the kids can play with toys all they want.  :-)  It is actually a lot messier than this usually, I'm not sure why it was so clean for this picture, maybe because the kids had been playing outside?

 Our one bathroom, shared by 7 people, is amazingly clean.  Of course, it is a chore of one of the kids to clean it everyday...which helps a lot!
Note (added 3/9/2011) For those of you wondering how in the world I can allow my children to be exposed to those nasty chemicals from cleaning the bathroom everyday...The kids don't actually clean with cleaners, they just use a wet washcloth to wipe down all the surfaces.  I do the cleaning myself once a week.  There, now I have that off my chest... :-)

 Our bedroom.  As I look at these pictures I realize how much more decorating I need to do.  Oh well, I can add it to my someday list.

 The boys room, which stays really clean, mainly because once the boys get up in the morning they don't stop moving till night time and don't ever go back into their room!  The kids all make their own beds, as you can probably tell.

 And finally, Emmaline's room.  (And Micah's for now).  She is a packrat loves to collect stuff and pile it on her dresser.  She is also cleaning challenged so her room is one of the most difficult to keep up in the whole house!  As you can see, she also likes to peel paint and draw on furniture...

Bookshelves

Recently online I saw the idea of rain gutter bookshelves -
http://raisingolives.com/2009/07/raingutter-book-shelves-tutorial/

Elijah and Josiah's bookshelves

Emmaline's bookshelf

I thought that they were so neat and decided to put them up in my kids rooms.  Mark and I took a Saturday and went to the store to purchase all the materials.  The intention was to hang them up when we got home but... Mark went to hang them and couldn't find the studs, as whoever built our house did not space them evenly!  So, we had to go back to the store and get a stud finder!  After getting the stud finder though it was a very simple matter to hang them up and took Mark all of 15 minutes.  I really like how they look and the kids seem to read the books that are on them a lot. (Technically only Elijah can read but that's not the point!)  I think they look pretty nice!

This weeks toys

I keep several bins of larger toys and once a week I change them out. Today was the day to change it so I got out a new bin, all the little people sets. It always amazes me how long the kids will play with a toy that they haven't seen for a week :-). The bins that I have are lincoln logs, large legos, little people sets and dress up clothes. I tried changing them out every day but for my personality it works better to do it once a week. When we do it this way all the toys get played with but I don't have to have them all out at once. :-) As for the smaller toys, stuffed animals, books and games, I have half of them packed up and the other half out. Once a month I switch them all out. I got this idea from a friend and it works very well for us. Again, all the toys get played with but we are not overrun with toys. :-)

Big Weekend Project

Our big project this past weekend was switching the location of our computer with two bookcases, moving all the kids toys onto the bookcases and packing up all of my books (no room left after putting out the toys). These are the "before" and "after" pictures. Mark did all the moving of furniture, setting up the computer, etc. and I put all the stuff on the shelves, sorted it all out and packed up the books. It was a lot bigger project than we expected but we are finally almost done. I packed up the books today and Mark will move them into our crawlspace tonight when he gets home from work. It looks sooo much better!