One of My Favorite Things: ORGANIZATION!!

Oh, how I long to be organized.  I have all of these visions in my head of how I want things to look.  Getting to that point might be difficult, but once it is done, I figure it will make things operate more smoothly since, hypothetically, everything should have a proper place.  (hah!  I know...I must be living in a dream world, right??)  Well, we have lived in our house for just over 15 months and there have been several things that I have wanted to do most of that time.  And, ladies and gentlemen, I can now mark two of those projects off of my lofty to do list!

The first item on this list was doing something to the closet in our laundry room.  I felt like it was such a waste of space as it was really hard to really store things in there.  It only had the one shelf all the way across and then we just kind of threw things in there.  Over the holidays, we remedied the situation! Well, at least for now.  And I am so proud.

Here is the BEFORE picture:

 My neighbor is an architect (i.e. spatially aware) and has also been doing lots of projects around their home (they are expecting baby #2 - a boy! - in April), so she offered to meet me at Lowe's one day.  She pointed me in the direction of what shelving would serve its purpose best in this space and helped me a LOT!  Then, I came home, took everything out of the closet (including the old shelf), cleaned the floor and baseboards (GROSS!), and prepped to install the new shelving.  Brad definitely had to help with this part - thankfully, it wasn't difficult at all!  So now, we have 5 adjustable shelves - I can move them vertically depending on what I need to store! YAY!  And there is space on the right side for our steam cleaner and vacuum.  And there is space underneath for the big bag of dog food and other random items that need to go there.  Perfection.  I also had the vision of getting rubbermaid storage containers and using my handy label maker to be uber organized.  And let me back up - I wanted this to be Katie's art and craft storage space.  We had been using a cabinet, but I think it will be best suited for bottle/baby food/formula storage come June, so it was perfect timing!  With that said, here is the AFTER picture...

 And a closer up view of one of the shelves.  Pretty awesome, right? :)  Right now there are 9 separate, labeled bins - and I bought extras to have on hand for new items that need a house.

The 9 categories are:

Play-Doh

Aquadoodle

Paint & Paint Brushes

Art Supplies

Crayons

Markers

Stamps & Ink

Outdoor Toys

Stickers

Am I missing any? Please make suggestions of others you think I will need!  Notice in the picture above that I use a magazine storage box for all of the coloring books, etc.

Another project I had been wanting to do was to really organize the toy bins in this cabinet and make bin labels for them.  I want Katie to start helping organize her toys and put things up in their place.  I am hoping that this system will begin to help with that!  Here is the BEFORE picture: 

 While at Lowe's getting things for the utility (now art) closet, I bought new colored bins.  I love how they brighten up the area!  And I headed to Michael's and bought small wood pieces and alphabet stickers and white paint.  I painted the pieces of wood and used the stickers to label them.  I thought they looked kind of dull, so I used glitter glue and put dots on them (anything can be solved with polka dots, right??) on the top and bottom.  After that dried, I did a layer of Modge Podge to seal the stickers.  After a little while, I hot glued some alligator clips on the back (2 per piece) of each one so they could clip to the handles on the bins.  And....TA-DAAAA! Here is the AFTER picture!

 There is Food, Dishes, Toys (for miscellaneous items), Dress Up, and Blocks!  I had initially wanted to put pictures of the item on the block as well, but I gave up on that idea.  And I think they turned out adorable (if I do say so myself)!

 Here is a closer up of the toy bin label...

And there ya have it, folks!  Two items OFF of my to do list.  WOOWOO!  AND I put the neutral colored bins in our cubbies in the laundry/mud room!  A post to come on that once that is more organized.  I can't do EVERYTHING at once, right?!