Things I want to change throughout the house

I really want to change a large number of things in my house but every weekend I don't seem to have a plan on what to do, SO I have decided to put everything in a single blog so here is a list of all the areas in my house that I want to do something with.

 

Computer desk - this is a dumping ground all the time and I want to clean it up so that there are not computer and video and PS2 and PS3 and PSP etc games on it all the time.

 

Childrens toy area - WOW with so much lego and toy trains and dolls houses and books floating around this is a continual mess and I really want to do something with it so that it can all be seen and all be played with when they want to.  I also want to stop people putting stuff on the chair all the time and they then have to sit on the floor (see the legs in the bottom right of the screen).

 

 

And from another angle

 

 

As you walk in through our front door there is heaps of shoes on the left - 6 people in our family plus all of the childrens friends means that we end up with lots of shoes.  I want to also look at making this area into a place that the children can put their school bags and school books etc, a bit like a mini command centre of some type.

 

Currently the school bags live in this long thing that is in front of you as you walk in the door but the bags are getting too big for it and it just collects rubbish so I would like to get rid of that and have a little shelf of some description instead (that is once hubby has put the wall back up!).

 

 

Kitchen bench is another dumping ground as well, including my hand bag so need to find somewhere for that too.

 

 

In the dining room we have a lovely cabinet that holds our good china but it collects things on top.  We have a lot of ornaments from our various international students that are currently hidden underneath all this junk.  I want to show them off so I will be looking for a nice shelf to go on the wall and that painting of pears has to GO!

 

 

Our bedroom has a huge big wardrobe but it seems to be holding a whole lot of things that are not clothes so we need to clean this out too.

 

 

On that note I am going to go and start doing some looking at solutions to my problems and hopefully in the blogs to come I can tell you all how my low (or no) money solutions help to fix our household problems.

 

Kitchen Pantry

Yet again it has been ages since I have written anything.  We are nearly 1/2 way through the year and I have not got around to blogging for ages.

 

A couple of months ago I decided to sort out our pantry.  My youngest has just had to go on a Gluten Free Diet so I also had to chuck out a lot of stuff that we are no longer eating becuase of this.

 

This is what I started with

 

I removed everything from the pantry and put it all on the kitchen counter.

 

 

Acutally I only removed 4 shelves as I ran out of room to put things and I decided that the top shelf which had been done a month earlier by hubby was still ok and the bottom shelf where all the alcohol sits could wait for another time.

 

This left it looking like :

 

 

After a thorough clean (and the second to bottom shelf emptied as well I started putting things back into place and now it looks much better.  I can actually see things now.

 

 

Stationery Cupboard

I cannot believe that it has been about 6 weeks since I last blogged - I actually did this organisation project about 4 weeks ago but have not had a chance to write it up so here we go.

I have a cupboard under the breakfast bar that holds all of our stationery items. Only problem is that I am forever getting requests for Pens, Pencils, Rulers, Colouring in gear from the children because they can't find anything. This is why:

 

So out it all came onto the kitchen table - and with much rolling of eyes from the Hubby I started to put things into piles with the biggest being the rubbish pile.

It was at this point that my youngest decided that this would be a great time to do some colouring in so here he is doing that.

I labeled chinese containers to hold the crayons and felt pens. The coloured pencils are in a container that has long since lost it's lid and to be honest I have no idea where it came from in the first place. These labels were just done in word, printed off and then cellotaped onto the containers with extra wide tape so they won't fall off.

Now with an empty cupboard to work with I started to put things back.

This is the final product with all the everyday items on the top shelf and the extra stuff on the bottom shelf. I googled 'how to make a box' and found that it is so easy - the pink box in the top right shelf is just made from cardboard and my daughter helped to decorate it.

 

 

Much easier to find things now and the bow in the top shelf has gone as well.

My first organising project

I was very excited yesterday that I only had one child at home and no hubby as he was at work so I decided to start my first project. I have started very small in an area only 63cm x 63 cm that sits beside the store. Now, as this was the general paper collection area and we have a gas stove I was constantly worried that something was going to go up in flames one day so this had to be sorted!

This is what it looked like to begin with:

I did the following to get this sorted:

1. Put batteries in the clock and put that back in my son's room
2. Put the cough medicine in the medicine cabinet
3. Put the fire extinguisher in it's correct place
4. Put the books away in the bookshelf
5. Threw son's faulty iPhone away
6. Put suntan lotion away
7. Ate the lollies in the paper bag
8. Put rubbish in a rubbish bag - I cannot throw this away at this point as hubby may suddenly ask for something that I thought was rubbish.

This left me with papers, pens and a few odds and ends so I sorted the papers into piles. 

The papers got sorted and placed into some lovely manilla folders that I found at Warehouse Stationery for only $4 all up.  The labels are just 'shapes' that I created in Word, coloured, named and printed out on sticky lables.  Cut them out, stuck them on and put it all into the recipe book holder that I have had for ages as a catch all and it looks like this.

This left me with some pen's that needed to be sorted out into ones that worked and ones that didn't and a few odds and ends like the cheque book, envelopes, hubby's lotto scratch-its etc that for now will sit on the side until I can find something that I like to put them in.

The final reveal looks like this and I am proud of my first attempt at organising with very little money and will continue to find little projects to practice on and try not to give my hubby heart failure :-)

AND FOR MY NEXT TRICK .................

The first blog

I love to look at websites and blogs about organising your house, especially on a budget. I get a huge amount of ideas from these sites but they are not specific to NZ so I thought that I would use the ideas from these sites and put an NZ twist on them. I also aim to find good deals for the resources that I use to help us NZ'ers.

I have 3 children, 1 husband and for 42 weeks of the year we have an international college student as part of our family too. My husband does a lot of soccer refereeing and training and during soccer season I become a soccer widow. We both work full time so I believe we need to get more organized so that we don't get completely overwhelmed this year.

I started writing this blog and then got horribly ill so I have not written again for a week but I will start showing you some of my projects shortly.