This week is the last week of school for my littles.  Summer is so close I can feel it…well I can’t actually feel it because it’s in the 50′s today here in Georgia.  But, the kids will be home from school and we’ll have lots planned for a fun filled summer vacation.  But, fear not my friends…I have dedicated one special day to my clients this summer.  FRIDAY!  I am scheduling clients now for Fridays through May, June and July so that I can help you get all your organizing projects tackled this summer.  I think Friday will be a great day because I can help you get your projects started and you’ll have the weekend to keep working on them.   I will be available for some weekend or evening time as well but all day Friday is yours.  So here’s my number….call me Friday!

Happy Summer Everybody!

Off of my kitchen I have an area where we have some bins for storing headphones and chargers (and the top one has candy…shhh).  The clipboards on the wall hold the school lunch menus and important papers I don’t want to lose from school.   The chalk board is a play space as well as a place I like to write encouraging scriptures for my kiddos and myself to read daily.

This is Scarlett’s room.  I have two sets of hook racks to hold her dress up clothes.  I find they get less mangled and torn when they are hung and they are easier to find the right one when she is ready to dress up.  It doesn’t hurt that they are a cute colorful decoration as well.  I found this bulletin board with three storage bins (sorry hard to see in this picture) at Land Of Nod online and I have used it in so many places in my house over the years.  In fact I have another in Savannah’s room you’ll see soon.

Here is my necklace storage in my room on the wall.  I bought this years ago at Pier One and it’s worked well to keep my necklaces from getting tangled or forgotten.

I did something similar in Savannah’s room for her necklaces as well.  This is hung behind her door since it’s not quite as pretty as I would like.

Speaking of hidden vertical storage…this is inside Savannah’s closet.  I hung another hook rack in here to store her purses and tote bags (and evidently babies in plastic bag carriers…creepy).

We hung an ikea mirror with a ledge in my oldest child’s room since she shares a bathroom with her two other siblings.  This has a little ledge for her products and makes mornings run more smoothly.

This is just like the shelf/bulletin board combo in Scarlett’s room.  It’s got three cubbies for all kinds of little things little girls need to keep.

In Savannah’s room she not only has a very tall bookshelf that we used to replace two shorter ones once she was tall enough but we have hooks on the wall for bags, coats and scarves.

In my hallway we had a small unused space on the wall and a neighbor gifted me this shelf.  The two were married and now we have shared book space in the hall between the bedrooms.   It holds a suprisingly large amount of books.

By my front door is where I keep my scarves on a hook rail.  It works well…one could easily have coats here for guests but we just don’t have guests that come in the front door that often.  Our coat closet is rather small but we manage just fine with that.  Oh now that I think of it we have a couple of hooks on the inside of EVERY hall closet door.

And finally this is the space where everyone comes in, through our carport into the kitchen.  I put lots of hooks for all the coats, backpacks and purses.  I have my own special hook up on the top left for my purse.  When we moved here I had a 2 year old and a 4 year old who wanted to empty the contets of my purse regularly…so up high it had to go.  I have some vertical files here that hold our paid bills, unpaid bills and school work that needs to be filed.  (See…I get piles of things that need to be filed too.  I do try to keep them off the counters though.)

So there they are…just a walk through my house and some of the spaces that I use that don’t really take up any more space.  Take a look around your house and see if you are using your space to the max.  You might not need a bigger space or an addition…maybe you’re just not using your space to it’s greatest potential.

We started with an empty pantry.

Then we took out all the shelves, lined the shelves themselves with clear contact paper and lined the back of the pantry with a patterned paper.

My client had picked up some baskets from Target.  I have wanted to use these in a project for a while because they both functional and cute.  They have a cool basketlike pattern on them but they are plastic.  The smaller ones were $6 and the larger ones $10.   We separated things into categories and sorted the food in the pantry based on this.  The top shelf has cereal and behind the cereal are paper products.  The next shelf has snacks.  The next shelf down has all the canned and jarred foods, flour and sugar canisters and the basket for grab and go foods for the kids.  The next shelf down has a row of baking products in the back (brownie mixes and the like) and then the baskets in front have a mixture of snack foods and things that are part of meals.  The bottom shelf has the two deep bins and one of these houses small appliances (mixer and a small chopper, etc) and the other has all the pastas and rices.  Behind the deep baskets my client has a bin with extra flour/sugar, her crockpot and her griddle.  The heaviest items went on the bottom shelf so they were easier to slide out.

We also rearranged a couple cabinets, purged a few things and just did a general once over on the other things in the kitchen.

This project took us about 3 hours from start to finish and it was a pretty detailed job.  Overall I was really impressed with our finished product.  She’s quite lucky to have such a large pantry and now it’s a beautiful large pantry that hopefully functions well for her every day!

My baby sister got married this weekend.  Isn’t she beautiful?  Have you planned a wedding…holy wow it’s a lot of work.  I think for most people it’s the biggest party/event that you’ll ever throw.  And I just get a bit overwhelmed thinking about an upcoming 8 year old and 10 year old having birthday parties I have to plan.  She was so great with all the details and it was a wonderful party that both the adults and all the children enjoyed.  I can’t decide if it would have been more work to plan a wedding with the internet than it was for me to just have to look in magazines and the phone book.  I feel like I got married in a different dimension compared to brides today.  I am pretty confident I would have made my mother insane with my indecisiveness if I had as many options as girls do today!

I did manage to get my whole family dressed up nice and got evidence of it in a picture!  It was a happy wedding weekend.

Spring is in the air…well the pollen is in the air…soon enough it will be warm.  After this freeze warning we have in Athens is over.  Grrr.  But…back to spring.  It’s a time to freshen up our home, change things up and let them breathe.  What do I mean?  I mean give them a little space.  I notice over the winter I tend to add more things into my home.  We need more coats, more blankets, more little baskets to put my stuff because it’s too cold to get up and go put them away.  When the spring comes I crave a little lightness in the house.  I like to see a little more empty space.  Space to let my things b…..r…….e…….a……..t……h……..e.

So how do you do this Julie?  Don’t you need all those things still?  Here is what I do.

1- Pick a room and remove everything you can lift with one hand.  Put it all in a pile…preferably a surface where you can see all that you have later.  This is a great time to do a little spring cleaning while you’re at it.  You can take this to whatever level you would like.  Maybe you just start with the decorative stuff, maybe you even do bookshelves…maybe even the walls.  I plan on doing this soon as I want to repaint a few rooms.  (Any painters wanna swap some organizing time? haha)

2- Once all the small things are gone you have an opportunity to evaluate the space.  Do you use this space?  Is it functioning for your family now?  Have you outgrown it because your family is larger or because you no longer have little bitties?  Maybe noone ever sits in that one chair in the corner.  Do you need to get rid of it?  Are you always looking for a place to sit down with your computer or to write some bills.  Maybe you actually need a desk in that corner instead of that chair.  Do you always have a glare on the TV from the sofa?  Maybe you could rearrange the room so that wouldn’t happen anymore.  I bet your husband would enjoy that come football season.  Do you really hate the color of the paint on the wall?  How about freshing that up so you feel inspired to make this space special again.   Ask a friend to come over and try out moving some furniture around.   Ask any of my clients, I like to try things out and the only way I can tell if I like it is if we actually move things.   Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t but then you know!

3- Now go take a look at that table of stuff you removed from your room.  Go ahead and get rid of the stuff you don’t love.  Why are you decorating  your house with things that don’t make you happy?  Now think about the feeling you’d like to have when you’re in that “new” room and only bring back the things that support that feeling.  If there are some things you love but they shouldn’t be in that room maybe you could use them in another room or maybe they need to be packed away for a period of time.  Go ahead and shop the rest of your house for things for this “new” room if you like.   Swap some pillows around the house.  Change out a painting or some pictures.  Your house doesn’t have to look the same way forever!  It might not even cost you a penny to have a fresh, new look for spring.

Sometimes you feel like you just need a fresh perspective.  You need something to motivate you a bit…get you thinking more clearly.  I mentioned to my very talented sister that I wanted to freshen up the blog and boom…the ball was rolling.  She is an awesome graphic designer at www.imajworks.com and truly has a talent for envisioning things and then making them happen.  She knew exactly the direction I wanted to go and she entered this magical little world as I watched her work.  Her fingers were on fire and she was tap tapping around making things change right before my eyes.  Did I mention that she’s also GETTING MARRIED this Saturday and preparing for that while she rocked out a whole new web design for me too?

I am working to make the blog more personal and so it was great to be able to add my instagram feed into the page.  This new site will also work wonderfully on mobile devices.  I feel inspired and hope this will help encourage my writing.  I have so many ideas I know and often have a hard time transferring that into blog posts.  I so often assume what I have to share is probably common knowledge and so I don’t feel it’s blog worthy.  But then someone reminds me that what comes so easily to me is not necessarily common knowledge or the way other brains think.  I fully understand this when I think about other topics that I am not great at but for my own subject matter I have to be reminded.  I hope you like the new look…I’m thrilled!  Thanks Jami!

Take a minute and click around and check out the new digs.  I’d love to hear what you think of the new space.

I’m an electronics junkie.   The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree and my kids are into their electronics too.   They end up plugged in all over the house and inevitably they get lost.  In fact…my oldest can’t find her DS right now.   I also don’t like them playing these late at night.  I’d rather them wind down with a book or my son likes to draw or write.  So I came up with a little tray in the living room for the electronics to live and get charged up.  I got the tray from a friend and spray painted it a warm grey color.   Now I just tell them all “electronics on the tray” and they know just what I mean.   I hope teaching them little things like this will help them as they get older and start to come up with their own systems.

Here is a little reminder of what we did to the room in August.

And here is what it is looking like today.

The room is a long rectangle.  It is about 7 feet wide and about 18 feet long.  A client of mine offered me the carpet when she was recarpeting her house.  It was in a room that was not often used and is in great shape.  She also gave me the hanging rack which has made me feel like I have a wonderful laundry center.  The Mister moved into a new office space and the sofa was already there and not needed so we used it here in his home office.  This photo was taken from the office side looking over to the laundry side.  (Sorry…pictures in a tiny room are not easy  to  take.)  There are two exterior doors in the room and one large double window on the other side.   We are still planning to put up insulation and sheet rock…saving our pennies for that project.  I know that will really transform the room.

The Mister’s office area.  This is our old kitchen table which I think will prove to be the right size desk for him to spread out.  I hung pictures right on the studs.  It makes it feel a little cheerier until we can afford real walls.

My laundry area.  It’s nothing fancy over here but carpet underfoot really feels great and a space to hang things as they come out of the dryer really saves time and helps me not leave them in a laundry basket getting wrinkled for days.  The shelf holds all my touch up paints for the house.

It’s far from where I would consider DONE….but it’s making me happy to have the project in motion. (Even if it’s SLOW MOTION.)

I am an iPhone user and I take lots of pictures.  I take pictures of my children.  I take pictures of my organizing projects.  I take pictures of things I’m selling on Craigslist.  I take pictures of things I think will work for clients.  I take pictures of things I think are beautiful.  Lots.  I share those from my phone on facebook or instagram but I always want them on my computer too.  There are many many ways to do that but one way that I found is especially helpful when taking pictures of things to sell or blog about is a great app called Bump.

From Bump’s website:

Q. How does Bump work?

There are two parts to Bump: the app running on your device and a smart matching algorithm running on our servers in the cloud. The app on your phone uses the phone’s sensors to literally “feel” the bump, and it sends that info up to the cloud. The matching algorithm listens to the bumps from phones around the world and pairs up phones that felt the same bump. Then we just route information between the two phones in each pair.

Basically for you and me that means that if I have a photo on my phone and I bump you while you have the app open…we can share photos.  But the better part is that if I bump my space bar while the bump website is open…it will transfer my photos to the computer.  It’s very cool…at least to this techie girl it is very cool.

What would you use Bump for?

Get Bump for Iphone

Get Bump for Android

I’m excited to tackle a few projects like this in January.  I love the fresh start after taking down all my Christmas decorations.  Do you have some pinterest projects that you’re planning on copying in the new year?