The Morsels and Me

For the past three days I've been addicted to a blog called The Complete Guide to Imperfect Homemaking. The author, Kelly, did a 31 day blogging challenge where she blogged every day for a whole month on one topic--organizing your home. Of course I got sucked in immediately. If you've ever seen my home you know it resembles a college dorm/daycare being inhabited by pack-rats. In other words we have a lot of stuff and not enough places to put it all. It's not so much a lack of room as a lack of organization, hence the reason for this post.

The first thing that caught my eye on the blog mentioned above was this:

A place for everything...and everything in it's place.

If it doesn't have a home, make a home for it or throw it! This makes so much sense to me since Andrew and I are both "pilers": if we don't know where to put it, we put it on the dining room table. Or the cabinet. Or in the office cubby.

No more, my friends! Perhaps it's just the nesting instinct that's causing me to overhaul my house and my organizational habits, and perhaps it'll only last as long as the pregnancy, but at least it's a start. Unfortunately I need to learn to take "before" pictures as well as the "after."

Sunday evening after Emery went to bed I organized my office cabinet. It was yet another place where we piled stuff when we didn't know what to do with it: invitations, random notes, nails, electronic cables, you name it. Any time I wanted to use the printer I had to shift everything out of the way. This is what it looks like now, after an hour and a half of work:

I know, it doesn't look like an hour and a half's worth of work. But believe me, if you saw the "before" and how much I threw out, you'd be impressed. I also cleared off the top of the cabinet (no picture of the bottom half because it's just a file box and printer paper. Boring.), which was also incredibly overcrowded. Now it's just some decor and--wow, this is new--FREE SPACE!

Today I worked on my linen closet which currently rests above my dresser in my bedroom. I've always been a sheet-rolling type of person, especially with fitted sheets (who really folds those anyway?). After reading a very thorough tutorial on fitted sheet folding, and taking advantage of Emery's second hour of napping, I re-folded every sheet and organized the closet. Again, sorry for not having a before picture. Just imagine a pile of rolled up, wrinkled sheets, pillowcases, and blankets.

I even tied up the individual sheet sets with ribbon so they won't get all confused! :-)

A few more things that I've done in the past two days: re-organized my file cabinet, cleaned the dishwasher (with vinegar!), cleaned the kitchen pantry shelves (also with vinegar!), and re-organized the bathroom closet. Looking forward to organizing our miscellaneous electronic paraphernalia, taking an inventory of our freezer, and prepping the bedroom for the crib, changing table, and glider! And hoping to end the week with a bit of canning, although let's not get too crazy.