Work At Home Musings

A few posts ago, I told you about a great website called Organized Christmas. The sister site of this website is called OrganizedHome.com and the owner, Cynthia Townley Ewer has written a great book Houseworks: Cut the Clutter, Speed Your Cleaning and Calm the Chaos.

I just purchased the book and it has some great tips and ideas. However, the best part is there is a forum that helps you use the book and get organized for the holidays at the same time! The forum introduces a new topic each week and gives reading assignments from the book and website. They are just into week number two so there is still time to catch up!

It is that time of year to think about getting ready for the holidays and I have found a great site to help get you organized - OrganizedChristmas.com. Even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, the site offers a great deal of useful information. There are numerous forms that you can print out and lots of tips to get ready for the holidays.

Make sure you check out the message boards as well. The Christmas countdown section helps you get ready in 6 weeks and starts on October 21st.

Take time to browse through all the sections. Even if you don’t follow all of the steps, there is enough useful information that will help you organize even a small portion of your holiday preparations.

Unless you have IBM memory inserted in your brain, it is hard to remember everything that you need to do for the holidays. I found a great solution - OrganizedChristmas.com. At Organized Christmas, you can print off helpful lists, find great gifts to make, get help scheduling holiday plans and even yummy recipes. The best part - it is all FREE!!

I printed off some of their lists last year and it came in handy. This year, I plan to read more on their site and hopefully be more prepared for the holidays this year.

I decided that I need to reorganize my Kitchen cabinets. I will do one or two at a time for my Tackle It Tuesday project! Here is the first one. The cabinet above the kitchen sink.

I removed all of the cookbooks and stored them elsewhere. I also threw away a lot of outdated food. Much cleaner don’t you think?

Normally I do a Tackle It Tuesday, but I have been so busy cleaning up for a birthday party on Saturday that I haven’t had time to take a picture and post it. I certainly have tackled a lot this week!

Here is my Tackle it Thursday dilemma! My daughter has dance every Thursday. She needs to have her leotard, tights, ballet and tap shoes. How come every Thursday she can’t find these things? She has a dance bag that I constantly remind her to put her things back in, but she doesn’t. Sometimes she says, I’ll do it in a minute. But you know how that goes - it doesn’t get done.

Any suggestions? I want her to be more organized, but not sure how to go about it. She is 7 1/2 and certainly could be responsible.

I am just loving this Tackle It Tuesdays! It really get me to complete something. This week I tackled boxes from our storage unit that have been sitting in the corner of the playroom for about 8 months. I threw away a lot of stuff, consolidated and have now only four boxes of books left that need to go in the attic. All in all a good days work!

I must of spent at least 4 hours yesterday and 2 hours today trying to organize my kids toys! We have way too many of them and I have them in plastic buckets for the most part. All the games are in a closet. There must be a better way to not only organize them but to get rid of them!

Unfortunately, Christmas and Birthdays bring a whole new slew of toys. If anyone has any ideas of what to do with the all, PLEASE HELP!!

I am trying a new way to organization my life next week. I have been reading the books by the SLOB sisters and they recommend scheduling your days. For example, Monday would be desk day (bills, etc), Tuesday would be heavy cleaning day (4-6 hours), Wednesday would be errands day, Thursday would be free day, and Friday light cleaning day.

Of course this doesn’t mean that you don’t do “maintenance cleaning” everyday. I think to keep on track I will have to do at least one load of laundry a day, general pickup and the dishes. I have children too that will be helping out.

I am going to give it a shot and see if it works. Have any of you every tried anything like this? What were your results?

This Tuesday I decided to conquer my messy table that has been holding a bunch of my stamping stuff. Here is the photo before:

I made sure that I put everything away that I took off that table. I also cleaned up the big mess under the table. Thank goodness I had already organized my stamping supplies and was able to put the stuff in the right boxes and drawers.

My daughter was able to do her homework there tonight!

Much better!

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I decided to tackle starting to paint my Living Room. I picked a nice terracotta color for two of the walls. Our house is basically all white inside. I painted the kitchen last year and one bathroom. The white just gets a little boring after awhile. When I get a pic, I will post it!

See my pics here!