Toy Room Closet Before and After

So this closet kind of became the one that we threw stuff into and shut the door then walked away from, when we moved in.  It was driving my kind of bonkers at how bad it was in there so finally I tackled it the other day during naptime.  Here is my before (above and below).

So first things first I emptied the whole closet out top to bottom.

I dragged a set of shelves that we had up from downstairs on there I put the games, and videos that were in the boxes.  I took the sweatshirts out of the pile of coats then hung the coats back up.  I am no able to walk into the closet and I was also able to put the vacuum in there as well.

 

Here is a fuller top to bottom view.

Again here it is Before:

After:

Shelves Before and After

So when we moved here I had never seen the place until I walked in the door.  I was greeted with the kitchen and the "dining room"  then I saw this:

It was empty of course, but the thought process went like this:  "Great, something to accumulate junk on."  and "What the heck am I suppose to put here?"  As you can tell from the picture it does have junk on it and it doesn't matter how many times it gets cleaned out almost immediately stuff gets put back on it.   I finally got sick of it and took everything down and cleaned it. I figured if I fill the lower shelves where we can reach so we can't really move stuff maybe it will lessen the amount of clutter that shows up so far it has worked!!  We will see for how long here is after:

Storage Boxes

I made these boxes for this. 

I started out with these:

I then cut the flaps off:

I tried two different ways I did them, one with paper and modge podge; the other with paint.

Here is how they look in the closet again.

Organizing the Front Closet

There is still a week left in the month don't forget the monthly cleaning goal for May.

I thought that I would show you one of the things that I cleaned this month.  We don't have an extra room so I choose to do the closets that don't normally get done.  The first one that I did was the front closet, it holds our coats and some of my crafting stuff and most of my sewing things.  I feel bad it started to take over and made it really hard to put coats in there.

Here is a before of the closet.

 And after...It feels much better to me and I was able to get rid of the hanging organizer.

 I decorated some boxes (tutorial coming late this week) and put the stuff that was in the hanging organizer in them.

A lot more room on the floor as well.

Monthly Grand Cleaning Goal

I know that I have at least a few more moves before I get settled down in one place for longer then three years.  I always dread the major cleaning that you have to do when you move out of a place.  I was given this kind of "schedule" awhile ago, that was to help out with a few things.  The first was to eliminate the need for "spring cleaning", second when you have to move it is a lot less stressful and third (my favorite) feel like your house is decent and mostly clean most of the time. 

I used this system in the last place we lived in and it was AMAZING!! I really didn't feel overwhelmed at all when we had to move, there was still cleaning to be done but not the serious deep cleaning like previous times.

So here is the basic idea of the "schedule"  you have tasks that you do every week, bi-monthly, and monthly while adjusting accordingly as well as a Grand Cleaning Goal for the month.  Its one room or just part of a room in the house that gets deep cleaning. 

The best part of all of this is that I'm giving you all the schedule as well as the tasks that go with it.  I will post what the grand cleaning goal for the month on the 1st of every month.  You are more then welcome to print off the Goal and tasks for the month and use that as your checklist as you clean.

This month you get two things, the sheet that has the tasks for every month and April's grand cleaning goal.  I'm going to start this all up again this month, some of it I can't quite do yet til the baby comes but I'm going to do as much as I can :)  I hope that you will all join me in doing it!!!

Here are the files for the month of April!!!  You should be able to click on them and print them off.  Before you print them off click on print preview and set the scale to 150%, it will make it bigger for you.  Now go turn on some fun cleaning music and jam out while you clean. (I'm still trying to figure out how to post a document for you to print this is what I have now thanks for being patient with me while I figure this out)

And here is April's!!

I'm linking up to these parties:

lil-luna-link-partay-19

Organizing the Kitchen Cupboard and Shelves

It seems that this winter every Saturday I go through a cleaning/organizing frenzy. Part of it is probably that I have been home most of the week and it starts to drive me crazy, another part is I'm going through a nesting phase. Today I tackled our kitchen cupboard and shelves. We live in a decent apartment but the kitchen is really small, We have one bigger cupboard that my food goes in as well as some small ones that are up high where I really can't reach. When we moved in we bought a set of plastic shelves so we could have some more storage space, so we have food stored there as well. Every thing was looking and feeling chaotic we had to dig around for everything that we needed and it was always in a different spot. This morning after we went grocery shopping and as I was putting food away I finally had it. I took everything out of the cupboard and off of the shelves and reorganized things around. Now I love my cupboard and keep opening it just to look at it.
My cupboard before

My Shelves before

It's pretty bad huh? I know it has been bugging us for a while.


After
Look there is even room for more!!!

The shelves feel breathable to me finally. (Yes I know that is a lot of hot chocolate, it was on sale awhile ago for $.50 and it was the beginning of my pregnancy it was one of the only things that calmed my tummy and heartburn.)