Simplicity: Home Organization

I was made aware that my skoy cloth link didn't work the other day, then upon further inspection I realized that their website is different - so here is the updated link - sorry about that!  

Today it is hard for me to get enough motivation to do much of anything.  I normally am not so effected by the weather or the time change for that matter, but both have rendered me a bit impaired.  I am tired, very tired, and when I get tired, I get sick.  So that, coupled with the fact that our weather went from 75 yesterday afternoon to a crisp 30 right now, has officially slammed me on my rear.  I normally don't feel the brunt of atmospheric pressure in my head, but there is always a first and never say never.  Of course today would be my craziest day of the week with grocery shopping, dry cleaning, bank, 2 yo well visit (Penny's, not mine) and then finishing up cleaning my house for our weekend of celebration for Jon's birthday and then on to the preschool open house, where as a board member, my presence is necessary for directing traffic.  So today is NOT the day to be feeling less than perfect, but less than perfect I am so there you go.  

My topic of home organization is near and dear to my heart.  As I explained in earlier posts, I was the dork who would go to friends houses and ask to organize their closets on a play date.  Seriously.  So it doesn't come as a surprise that I love to organize.  Again, like most of my other philosophies, it isn't rocket science. Everything has a home or home base if you will.  Be it a space on a shelf, a bin, a basket, etc.  You get the point.  If your stuff has a home you will be more tempted to put it there, if you are tempted to put it there then you won't have stuff all over and you won't lose things.  It's a beautiful cycle.  I also think that organizing goes hand in hand with purging.  For example - my linen closet.  Everyone  in our home has two sets of sheets, one winter, one rest of the year.  I wash them weekly or more frequently as necessary and just put them back on the bed.  It's less for me to store and it airs out the mattresses.  When the boys were in twin beds I had two quilts that I had gotten on clearance  for their beds.  Well now that Penny is in a twin we decided to move Drew to a double and needed to get bigger bedding.  I was able to get the same sheets that he had in the twin, but obviously the quilts were history.  When it came to those extra sheets and quilt, I obviously didn't need two sets, so I gave a set to our cousins whose little boy is about to transition into a big boy bed and his room just happens to have all the right colors for my stuff to match.  Kismet! Part of organizing is paring down so that you can make sense of what you have.

Kids - this could quite possibly be a topic unto itself.  I will try not to drag it on too much!  My kids have never wanted for toys, between my folks and Ryan and my old toys, we've always had plenty to go around.  What I have always done though is that EVERYTHING and I mean EVERYTHING has a bin.  That way when we are done playing, it goes back into that bin.  Most of ours are IKEA bins that cost next to nothing and you can write on them with crayon and wipe it off with magic eraser.  What doesn't fit into an IKEA bin fits into these mesh totes from the container store.  Now my kids aren't perfect and we do have the occasional mexican stand-off when it comes to cleaning the toy room, but our toy room is picked up EVERY night and everything goes back into its place.  That way tomorrow I don't have to face, "Mommy, where is my spiderman with the web slinging fingers?"  Our friendly neighborhood crime watcher will be in his bin, where his other friends are located.   We also clean out the toy room on a monthly basis.  Things break, that is inherent with children, so we clean those out, markers that are dry, pencils with no lead, fully colored coloring books, etc.  This keeps things as minimal as we can with our kids.  I am amazed when I hear parents say, oh I just want a basement to put all their stuff and just close the door.  While that is a nice luxury, it doesn't really provide the teaching opportunity of respecting ones things so they last and how to clean up after themselves.  I may be a stay at home mom, but I'm not a stay at home maid.

Now before you think that I am this crazed lunatic when it comes to picking up, I'm not, not really anyway.  My goal is to keep up with it during the day, but the bottom line is it is done by the end of the day.  Now that isn't to say that the basket at the top of the stairs to our basement isn't filled with miscellaneous toys to be put away or a laundry basket of clothes waiting outside a bedroom for the next day - that happens, a lot, but the bottom line is that it is a constant. If you don't find a system and try to keep it up, you'll be drowning in excess linens and fisher price vehicles before you know it!  

I think this post will end for now, I'll talk more tomorrow about organizing paperwork and crafts and such tomorrow or the next. Aren't you proud of me?  I'm simplifying my posts, you've got to start somewhere!

Thanks!