Organizing and Cleaning

Organization is a Huge part of my life, although you may not have been able to tell the last 3 years. Since moving into this house our life has been one project after another which means moving stuff from one room to another... This was one of the major things I have missed about our old house, I mean we had projects but it was a new construction house and really it was minor things we were doing (replacing linoleum with tile, painting, putting in a fence, etc)

This house on the other hand is major renovation, complete gut of kitchen, adding in a closet to the office so everything had to be moved out of the nook, bathroom remodels (future) so nothing stays in one spot for long. This is the year that we are going to change. We bought these gray tubs a few months ago at Target for under $4/tub but they wouldn't fit on our existing metal shelving so we decided to build something that would fit our needs in the unfinished area of the basement.

Our storage area is not always this bad looking but remodeling the family room meant most of our stuff ended up here.

We used 2x4s and OSB. This was not an easy task because we had limited room, it was built in place without moving most of the stuff out. After seeing how nice it turned out I decided to move the cheap plastic shelves designated for garage sale stuff out and wrap the shelving around on the wall. We ran into one glitch though... our hot water heater decided to die. Of course it was the day before record lows and snow. It was a late night but several attempts to repair we ended up getting a new one. Since it was a Saturday night and bad weather we ended up installing it ourselves with the help of my dad by phone. It works, no leaks, and already seems to be better than the old.

Now to building more shelving, just remember that we were working with the old hot water heater still in the way. Actually I am standing by it taking the picture below.

 This time we made a few changes (there was a week break) instead of just screwing the boards we used pocket screws and a laser level proved again to be our best friend. Also instead of me having to hold all the weight while my husband drilled we used clamps on one side to help hold the boards in place so I wasn't shaking each shelf as bad. Now we are trying to decide if we should build more and make it a U shape or try to make everything fit on the current and move our exercising stuff back to this area as well, which is what I prefer.

Since it was a 3 day weekend we did a project a day. Saturday was the shelves, Sunday cleaning the garage/ raking leaves so we could fit the trailer in our backyard again. It was a MASSIVE amount of leaves especially since I had mowed all the leaves right after most fell.

That pile is literally what was in our driveway in front of our garage and next to the fence. I don't even want to think about the yard.

While cleaning out the garage we decided we should finally use some of the wood we bought a while back for a bookcase but since we already bought shelving because I didn't think we would get to it (had the wood for 2 years) we needed a new idea. We decided on a bookshelf anyway but not for the original intended child and now we are thinking about making it to go beside our oldest child's bed. We don't have nightstands in their rooms so this would make a perfect place to put a little lamp and his water at night. His books will be next to his bed, loves to read until he falls asleep, and plan to put in dividers on the lower shelf for baskets or whatever. I am looking forward to having a place to put stuffed animals. We are thinking about building two, one for each side of his bed but we will have to see how the first one turns out.

Here is a sneak preview before it was painted (black) well it is still in the painting stage but I'll have a more detailed post later. Right now it is time for bed!