Did you know that January is Get Organized Month?  If you are ready to get organized this month,  have I got the event for you!

It’s that time again–Saturday, January 28th is the 6th annual NAPO-Austin ‘Clear Your Clutter Day’ sponsored by the Austin Chapter of the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO).

This year the event will be held  at Bethany United Methodist Church 10010 Anderson Mill Road, Austin, TX 78750.

Drop off for FREE — ONE CARLOAD PER HOUSEHOLD of:

•     Up to three boxes of paper to be shredded
•     Women’s new or gently used career clothing and accessories
•     New or gently used shoes (men’s/women’s/children’s)
•     Discarded flattened moving boxes
•     Used cell phones and computers and electronics
•     Useable unwanted items (furniture, books, clothes, rugs, art, etc.)
•     Non-useable unwanted items** (a/k/a JUNK)
•     Mobility assistance devices (wheelchairs, walkers, crutches, shower chairs, etc.)

Click here for more information and a list of what you cannot bring.  IF you do NOT live in the Austin area visit the National Association of Professional Organizers web-site calendar for Get Organized Month events in your area.

Happy clutter clearing!

“Organizing is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up.”

- A.A. Milne

What a treat, to take glimpse inside the closet of one of Americas most well-known fashion designers!  So let’s get down to the good, the bad, and the reality about Ralph Lauren’s closet.

The Good
Let me just say: lights, ottoman, mirrors!  In case you are new to my blog you may not know that I repeatedly talk about the importance of good lighting in a closet, a mirror to see what you look like, and a nice place to sit.  Those are some of my favorite closet must haves.  If your closet isn’t big enough for a stool, bench or chair, that’s okay as long as you have a place nearby to sit down and put on your shoes etc.
I love the boot storage in this closet!  They are using the space above the hanging clothes which can sometimes be underutilized.  Also many people put shoe storage near the floor so this is a little different and I love it.
Luggage stored above.  One of my favorite parts of this closet is how they show the luggage stored above the gorgeous rich closet built-ins.  Now THIS is reality!  Even if the luggage shown in this picture is decorative you can still use this idea in your home!  You could use antiques luggage or decorative boxes to store mementos, keepsakes, off season clothes, or even your old cheerleading outfit!  The options are endless!  Or you could store your actual luggage at the top of the closet too.

The Bad
Well, what can I say bad about Ralph Lauren’s closet?!  The bad is – I wish I saw more of it!  What’s behind those mirrored doors?  Where are all the shoes?  Sure I see lots of boots, but where are the other shoes?  Maybe they are at the very end of the closet on the left hand side of the picture.  It’s hard to tel, but I want to see more.

The Reality
When you look at the solid wood, the molding, the drawers, the under cabinet lighting and the mirrored cabinets this would be a very HIGH dollar closet.  A similar look could be achieved by meeting with a local closet design company like More Space Place or looking at IKEA.  Closet designers often have different types of solid wood or laminate that they can use in your closet for a fraction of the price of a high dollar solid wood.

Thanks for indulging in Ralph Lauren’s closet with me.  What is your favorite part of his closet?

Are you ready to do an entire pantry makeover for the New Year?  Are you looking to stock a beautifully organized pantry with foods that are good for you?  Well The Container Store and Whole Foods are giving you the chance to enter to win a pantry makeover stocked full of pantry staples!

Visit Whole Foods Blog: Whole Story to read details and enter.

Five Grand Prize Winners will be determined and will win $599.00 gift card to Whole Foods Market and $500.00 Elfa Store More card!

Personally, I can’t wait to enter!

Good luck!

Organizing jewelry can really be fun, especially if you incorporate your beautiful jewelry into you decor.  Last week in Jewelry Organizing Part 2 – Necklaces I showed you some creative ways to organize necklaces.  In this post I’m going to show you some creative things you can do to display and organize bracelets and accessories.

Pictured above is a simple wooden crate with two glass bottles used to hold bracelets.  What a fun and eco friendly idea!  If you are worried about the glass bottles falling I would recommend attaching  something to the bottom of the bottles like the 3M Command Frame Stabilizer Strips.  The Command products can typically be removed easily and are not supposed to damage surfaces.  This fun idea comes from Decoratrix.

Another fun idea that anyone can do is paper towel holder re-purposed into a bangle or cuff bracelet holder.  This is nice because you can find paper towel dispensers in many different styles just about anywhere.  You can even use this in a kids room.  I love how easy this is.

In the picture above from Show Me Cute is another example of using fruit, cupcake, or cake stands stacked on top of each other to hold jewelry.  In Jewelry Organizing – Part 1 I showed you another gorgeous example of using stacked stands to hold necklaces, rings and more. Love this idea and so easy to replicate.

Last but not least is the ultimate headband organizer for the DIYer.  Lysssa Beth covered an oatmeal can with two sheets of scrapbook paper and attached it to a candle stick with a hot glue gun.   Instant headband organizer!  The inside of the canister can be used for bows or other hair accessories too.

Next week will be the last post in my Jewelry Organizing series so stay tuned!  As always let me know if you used any of these ideas or how you are organizing your jewelry.

Last week I brought you PHASE 1 Organizing Stuffed Animals as part of my kids playroom make over.  If you have children, especially children who can say “Yes” and “NO”, then you know that a playroom decluttering and makeover is not something that happens overnight.  In fact my playroom makeover took about 2-3 weeks and now I’m just putting the finishing “décor” touches on it (week 4).  Over the next few weeks I will be revealing the different components of my girl’s playroom makeover.

One thing that I’ve noticed as a Mom and as a Professional Organizer is that kids have collections!  Whether it’s collections of Star Wars figures, Polly Pocket’s, Barbie’s, Hot Wheels cars, you name it.  So there is always a challenge on how to store these collections.  For my girls there were 8 collections that needed to be addressed during our playroom makeover.
The challenge: what do I do with these collections so the kids can still use them and it still looks neat and tidy?

The items were already grouped into categories of: princesses, fairies, cars/vehicles, tiny stuffed animals, Shrek toys, Ice Age toys, Star Wars, and the dreaded “random characters” bin.  Overall 8 categories in 8 different bins, baskets, totes.

The girls went through and got rid of about 20-30 of these tiny action figure style toys that they no longer wanted.  ~Cartwheels!~

I regrouped what was left into the following categories: princesses and fairies, vehicles, random characters and stuffed animals (which NOW was mostly made up of Shrek, Ice Age, and small stuffed animals), and Star Wars.  I was down to 4 categories!  Before: I had many of these things in baskets or bins and some of them were not being used at all, probably because the girls could not see them.  So I decided we needed to find clear acrylic jars that would hold all these tiny treasures.

So now the hunt was on for the right containers.  I started at IKEA with the wonderful Burken Jars.   I was so excited I bought about 4 of the large and 3 of the medium and brought them home.  The largest jar was way too small and the fact that they were glass made me very nervous, so it was back to the drawing board.  I searched the web over and back for “large acrylic jars” and finally found these generically named “Acrylic Jars” from Pottery Barn Kids.  I still had the IKEA jar so I measured the base and then looked at the listed dimensions for the Pottery Barn Kids Jars…I was SHOCKED!  These jars were giant!  They were acrylic!  They were just what I was looking for!  I called my local PBK store and had them put just about all the jars they had left on hold for me.  So that night after dinner I made the 45 minute trek to the mall just days before Christmas.  Call me crazy!

And when I got them home, they were perfect!  I almost cried!  I will admit, these jars even on sale are not cheap.  But I was really glad I could find something that was NOT glass and would hold ALL the toys!

This was so exciting for me because now I felt like we could use all the little toys as part of our décor rather than them being tucked away for no one to see (or play with).  Yea!

I hope this inspires you with your collections!  Post a comment below to let me know what you do!

“All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.”

- Henry Ellis

Okay, you are really going to have to stay with me for a minute on this one, I know the thought of Miley Cyrus might not hold your interest, but stick with me.

I’m always in search of Dream Closets, and it’s been fun sharing “celebrity” dream closets with you.  So when my amazing and patient assistant Anna and I ran across this one we had to laugh a little.  Then Anna pointed out that this would actually be pretty easy to replicate.  She was right!  So I’m going to dish the good, the bad,  and the unrealistic about Miley’s closet.

The Good:

Love the color pallet!  If you have a teen, a tween, or a 7 year old this color palette would be a great one that could hold for a few years.  Black and white never go out of style, so you will always be able to find accessories.  Keep your eyes open for my upcoming posts on my girls’ playroom makeover reveal for more ideas on this color palette! You can find some fun accessories at Pottery Barn Teens.

The shoe shelves!  Okay this is the brilliant piece in this closet!  If your closet is lacking storage or just too small, consider adding a shoe shelves similar to these!  You can find something similar at Pottery Barn called the Studio Wall Shelf .  You also consider one from World Market.   I love this idea!  Perfect for shoe overvflow in a stylish and fun way.

Of course you know (if you read my blog) that I love a chair or stool in the closet!

Also, a full length mirror is a MUST!

Wall Art.  Even the wall would be super easy to recreate!  A simple coat of paint (I recommend a paint with the primer already in it so you only have to paint one coat) and repeating some vinyl wall art.  I found a similar chandelier at VinylWallart.com.

The Bad:

The only thing I don’t like about storing shoes like this is that they will need to be dusted.  Sad but true.

The Unrealistic:

Let’s face it, this is a pretty big “closet” and all we see is shoes!  Where are the rest of her clothes?  Maybe she has another closet for that?  To the common person a closet this size dedicated solely to shoes is not a reality.  But that’s why this is a dream closet!

As you can see there are lots of things I love about Miley’s closet!  Thanks for hanging in there with me!  I told you it would be fun!

With the holidays just behind us you may be wondering “what do I do with all these toys?”!!!  Well, over the next several weeks I will be slowly revealing what I did with my kids toys and playroom.  In late November I started asking my girls slowly if they still played with certain toys.  My oldest has NEVER wanted to get rid of anything, so usually I would sneak a few things out that they never played with.  So I used my 5 step system that I use with clients GREAT.  It was time to start letting my girls make their own decisions and boy was I surprised!!!

In December it was time to get serious!  One day when the girls were at school I pulled out all the stuffed animals from the “stuffed animal hotel” (AKA the IKEA PS Fangst) that they never play with and I gathered ALL the other stuffed animals.

On a side note: I know that storing stuffed animals is a universal problem for SOOOO many people.  It’s probably one of the most frequent questions I get from my clients.  So let me just say the IKEA “stuffed animal hotel” can be a good thing, but in my case (as you can see in the picture above in pink-it’s empty in this picture because I got so excited about organizing that I started emptying it out before I remembered to take a picture of it for you-sorry) it was located in the corner of their playroom closet and was not easy to access.  I think it would be better in a room where the kids could easily reach it.

Then the girls and I sat in the playroom and went one by one “do you want to keep this one?”.  If one of them wanted to keep a stuffed animal we kept it.  To my amazement…they got rid of 33 stuffed animals!  Above was just a few of the animals before we sorted them.

Now that we had reduced our numbers I need to figure out what we were going to do with them.  After looking at what we had left I realized it was mostly small stuffed animals and only a few large ones.

So I decided to re-purpose a hanging shoe bag that really wasn’t working to its best potential.  Now the animals had a new home. We had some extra room at the bottom so I added back some of the items that go with the girls dress up clothes in the closet.

I had already started using this adorable Simply Stashed behind the door organizer for some of my girls Barbie dolls earlier this year so now I added the remaining stuffed animals to the top.

Now Barbie and friends all had a place to hang out!  The great thing was that I asked the girls if they thought this would be a good place for the Barbies?  They said “yes”.  Then I asked them “will it be easy for you to put the Barbies away if this is where we keep them?” and their response was “yes”.  I must admit we actually have about 20 Barbies and at Christmas the girls got a Barbie house, so many of the Barbies are permanently residing there these days.  But, the girls were able to let go of three Barbies to send to their Grandparents houses!  Score for us!

Now my girls space had been transformed! Now they can actually see all their stuffed animals so when they want to play with them they can.  I would guess we will go through them again during the summer.

If you want to learn more about my 5 step GREAT organizing system you can click here to go to my home page to get my no cost 7 part audio series.

Good luck with your kids spaces!

Isn’t it great how a simple brightly colored necklace can make your entire outfit POP?!  But how do you store all those gorgeous strands of goodness without them looking like a colorful bowl of spaghetti?  This is a common question I hear from client so I have been pursing the web to find loads of gorgeous and creative ideas for you.

The picture above is from blog Flights of Whimsy and is simply gorgeous!  This is an easy DIY project: paint an old frame, attach thin branches to the frame, nail small nails to the branches to hold necklaces.  I like this because it is so easy to use!  All you have to do is take the necklace off it’s individual nail.  You don’t have to take three necklaces off to get to the one you need.  This also makes putting your necklaces away a snap!  When things are easy to put away, you will stay much more organized! You can also visit Flights of Whimsy for more amazing jewelry ideas.

This super quick and easy idea came from blogger This Bird Can Sing.   She used a towel rack with shower curtain hooks to hang and organize her necklaces! This is a great and inexpensive solution with a beautiful result!

This is hands down one of the most creative things I’ve seen in some time.  Ashli from My Mini Manor is amazing and re-purposed cutlery trays to hand jewelry!  Attach wooden trays to a wall and then added hooks to hang necklaces!  She also used the smaller spaces to stack bracelets and other accessories.  You can see more pictures of her amazing makeover on her site, which is one of my new favorite blogs!

Finally, this last picture is a beauty in itself.  The combination of old and rustic with the pearls and gold is yin and yang at it’s best! I found this from Be Different Act Normal.  But practically speaking this rustic rake necklace hanger is such a smart idea!  14 instant necklace holders!  You could probably pick one of these up at a garage sale for $1!

What do you think?  Are you inspired to start organizing some necklaces?  Never fear, I will bring you more jewelry organizing ideas next Wednesday!  Oh and if you missed Jewelry Organizing Part 1 click here.