A Productive Weekend!

As you may know, we're hoping to sell our current house and buy a bigger one. We love our house, with all its faults, but one fault we can't look beyond is the lack of space. It was great for the two of us, would have been livable with one baby, but with two babies who will eventually need their own rooms, it doesn't work. We got engaged in this house, and brought our babies home to this house (eventually), so it'll be bittersweet to move on.

That said, I'm thoroughly enjoying getting the house in shape to sell. I'm not sure Blue is enjoying it quite as much, mainly because he got tasked with ripping apart the kitchen, which he did Saturday with the help of a few awesome buddies.

What a mess. And did I mention no kitchen sink for the next week?

The stoneworks people are coming today to template for our pretty new granite, which will hopefully be installed by the end of next week. Huzzah!

So purty.

Once that is installed I'll be able to better gauge backsplash pattern. If the counter seems really busy I'll go simple, but I did find a mix of stone/glass that I liked, if it'll work with the granite we picked. We shall see. We also got a shiny stainless sink and a sexy new faucet (that doesn't rust everywhere!) with a pulldown nozzle thingy. I'm excited to show you the "after" shots whenever the room is ready.

Meanwhile, during the smashy smashy, these two blissfully napped, although not for terribly long. They're still doing their middle of the night chats, which is a bit frustrating.

Day 101 Project 365

Day 98 Project 365

After they went to bed last night (rarely difficult anymore, which is good), I tackled the hall closet. This closet serves many purposes: bathroom towels, cleaning supplies, random screws and nails, tools, tape, batteries, flashlights, coats, blankets, umbrellas, etc. And the problem was somewhere along the way it turned into a free for all.

Chances of blankets and/or plastic bags falling on you were high.

Need a tool? Good luck!

These spray bottles also often toppled down.

The whole ugly mess

Due to some inspiration from the I Heart Organizing blog, I went to the Container Store yesterday and spent a tidy sum on bins and such to make this space organized and somewhat attractive. I opted for some $2.99 plastic bins for the shelves because, frankly, I can't afford to spend $14.99 on each bin. The ones up top were a bit more expensive because you really do see them when you open the door.

Back of the door

Decided to tap into this underutilized space with some simple stick-on hooks. I found my polka dot umbrella, which I thought I lost two years ago. Yeah, I did: in this closet! Now umbrellas are easy to find on rainy days.

A bin for blankets

 The blankets will no longer leap down onto our heads, as they now rest in this bin on the floor. Much easier to get to and put away! The scary tools, like small saws, are still in the corner, hidden away.

Cleaning stuff

 The spray bottles are now contained in a bin, which I can take out so I have everything at my fingertips when I go on a cleaning spree. The spray bottles looks so nice all in a row!

Lots of bins

I have some work to do still on the main shelves. I split our slew of items into tape/glue, lightbulbs, flashlights/batteries, electrical stuff, painting supplies, and small tools. There are a few blue-topped bins left from our last attempt to organize (which lasted for a little while) and they hold fasteners, nails, and screws. We still have a few random containers of random bits that I need to organize. I might get one of those things with small drawers to organize the nails/screws into, but we'll see. That will take muchos effort. You can see some board games still live in this closet, although ideally they would get moved out somewhere else.

So much nicer

The bin in the middle of the top shelf is our "guest kit" and contains two big towels and two face cloths. I will add a set of sheets as well, but those live in the nursery and the kiddos were sleeping. Now when people come to stay, I can just pop this container down and they have all their linens!

I also managed to condense our towels from three shelves to one by rolling them up. Who knew?

So there you have it. Our newly organized front closet. I still want to do some labels on the bins in some pretty font, and probably will do a nice shelf-liner as well, but this was good progress for a Sunday evening! I'm hoping when people open the door they won't shirk away in terror anymore, but will rather say, "Ah, what a lovely closet that holds so much stuff in an easily accessible way!"