Simply Monday:

Well, I have to say that I didn't actually get my organizing task for last week completely done. Shame on me! But I had great plans to do it - twice - it just didn't happen. However, I have made some progress in the laundry area and I have decided that I AM for sure going to go through with it. And I think I've figured out a good way to do it. Instead of just getting rid of everything at once, we're going to whittle it down little by little. Abby and I did some of this today. I went through and took out clothes that were stained, too small, never worn, etc... Abby went through her own clothes and got rid of the things she didn't want any more. Now we're not down to what I want to get to eventually, but we made some real progress today. And I figure if I do this every time I do the laundry for the next couple of weeks I should be about there.
Now if I could just figure out where to put the hamper so that it's centrally located...

Anyhoo - here's a picture of the closet in question after our first going through. (Sorry, I didn't take a before pic, but there are definitely less clothes. Trust me.) That's Sunday clothes for all 4 kids, and shirts for the older 3. (Everything else is in their dresser.)




Since I'm still working on last week's task, I'm only going to add something small for this week. I don't want to get too crazy here. And besides, this project is sort of half-way done, too.

Before: This is a picture of our dining/kitchen area. The table and chairs are over to the right of the picture (you can kind of see the table leg there). It is basically the transition between our living area and the kitchen area. As you can see it houses the microwave and the chest freezer. Both vitally important to the happiness of our household. However, this area was just not working for me for a multitude of reasons: the microwave is on a TV tray, the top of the freezer is a dumping ground of anything I don't know where to put at the moment, just as the floor in front of it does for the bigger, bulkier things and among other things I won't bore you with, it's white, on white, on white. BLAH and seriously non-functional. And we're just not even going to mention why there is a bike there...

So I started working on it. I looked around for a microwave cart - I even searched in Utah over Christmas break (apparently they don't use microwaves so much in Sweden, because Ikea does not carry such a thing). But it was fruitless. I couldn't find what I was picturing would work. Then one day I decided to visit Kmart - I had not yet gone to one here on the island. Can I just tell you - I LOVE IT! I won't go into it all now, but I found a great "cart" for my microwave, with storage, which was the most important factor - storage with a door, even better. And I added my ribbon, bulletin board thingy to the wall for color and to, you know, to hold things. But as you can see, it's still a work in progress. I still have many things I need to find a home for. So that's my other job this week.


So there's the before and during pics and hopefully I'll have the after pic to show you next week. Keep your fingers crossed!

Oh and in case you were wondering, those shelf doors flip up and slide back. And there is glass in the panels, but I didn't want to have to keep things neat in there for it to look good, so I ModgePodged some scrapbooking paper onto the inside of the glass. I think it came out spectacular! (And, yes, those are still our Christmas cards hanging up on the wall, I should really take those down....)