Suitcase Makeover

I recently picked up an old, ugly but functional suitcase at a neighbor's garage sale for 50 cents. I came home, cleaned it up, put the kids' off season clothes in it, and stuffed it under the bed.

The neighbor is apparently an Ebay seller that people regularly unload their junk on. She's carried over two more big 'ol ugly suitcases to me in the last couple of weeks. They do work nicely for storage. Also the price is certainly right.

Old suitcase, before painting.

I figured there must be a way to pretty them up.

I did a little googling, and ran across this awesome before and after on Instructables.

I had my husband pick up some pretty spray paint on one of his many trips to Home Depot, and got to work. I tried taping off the silver trim on the first suitcase. It was a fussy job, and in the end, it turned out sort of sloppy. (I'm going to pick up another can of that color paint, and paint the trim after all.)

For the second suitcase, I skipped the taping, and painted the whole thing. It looked much better, and took considerably less time.

Old suitcase, after painting.

It looks great. I'm going to be scavenging Goodwill from now on for more. We don't have a lot of "hidden storage," (closets and cabinets,) in our house, and these are functional and cute "visible," storage. This blue one has replaced an ugly plastic tote full of yarn in my bedroom.

The Big Closet Clean Out of 2012

One of the things that I've realized over the last several months is how much of my time and energy is spent taking care of things. Since I continue to have a fair number of "bad days," where I don't feel like doing much, it seems more imperative than ever that I spend what time and energy I do have taking care of people, and not things.

In my pre-mommy life, I loved clothes. At one time, I had several very large closets full of just my own clothes. When we purchased our little house a few years ago, I had to pare back considerably, to fit what I had in one very modest closet. I still jammed in as much as humanly possible, at times experimenting with a small dresser or a second rack at the bottom of the closet, to hold even more. On the (extremely) rare occasion that all of our clothes were clean, I'd have to pile some somewhere.

The truth is, like most other people, I wore maybe a third of what I had. I'm a stay at home mom. Most days I wear jeans and a t shirt. If I'm honest, most days I rotate through the same half a dozen pairs of jeans and t-shirts.

So I did a major purge, over the course of a couple of months, getting rid of at least half of what I had. I got rid of things that didn't fit, that didn't go with anything, and that for some reason just never seemed "right."

I'm left with, you guessed it, mostly black or tie dyed shirts, and jeans.

I'm sharing this because it's been ridiculously freeing.

The clothes I kept fit, and I like them, which means I'm spending way less time trying to figure out what to wear. Instead of having to dig through 12 pairs of so-so jeans that are too short, or the wrong color, or whatever, I have about half that many, which I love. (Gap 1969 jeans are the best, by the way, especially if you're tall.)

I can now hang all of my clean clothes in the closet at once without a struggle. The clothes don't end up terribly wrinkled from being smashed either. (Not like I was ironing them anyway, but at least I don't have to wear wrinkled clothes all the time anymore.)

I'm maintaining my closet equilibrium by getting rid of something old when I get something new.

Basically, I'm on sort of a long term mission to declutter our whole house like this, even if it takes a year.

Cross One Thing Off the List, and Add Three More...

I've been trying to do some organizing and decluttering around here. As hard as I try, there are certain spots in the house where stuff just tends to accumulate.

My desk is one of them. The picture below is what it normally looks like, on a clean-ish day. (Why yes, I was browsing on Pinterest at the time...) It's awful. It's also centrally located in our living room.

Before.

I thought I was doing really well last week when I scored a super deal on these little drawers, ($5 total,) and spent several hours getting everything organized.

After.

Awesome right? I can access the printer, and the record player without having to move anything.

Unfortunately, as I'm cleaning things up, my sweet husband is making new messes elsewhere in the house. We had a flood last fall, and are just now getting around to ripping up the flooring, so we can replace it, paint, and replace the damaged cabinets.

Ugly, water damaged linoleum.

So, um, no more heaping pile of junk in the living room, but instead, the first thing you'll see when you walk in the door is this, in the dining room...

Work in progress.

Heaven help us.

Visually Organize Your Bookmarks

For years I've been bookmarking sites to go back to "later." Links to recipes, craft tutorials, and homeschooling info piled up into the thousands. Even categorized by subject, it was still hard to get my hands on the right thing at just the right time.

Enter Pinterest. After hearing people rave about how cool it was, I finally decided to check it out. Some people are using it to catalogue photos of clothing they like, wedding photo inspiration, or um, pictures of cute puppies.

I'm using it as a visual way to keep track of all my bookmarked crafting and homeschooling references. Although it's been a little tedious to "pin" hundreds of sites, I can now click on the "board" for say, "homeschool dinos," and find pictures from every site I've bookmarked in that category. It's easy enough to find just the right one, and then click through to the relevant site.

It's going to be a huge time saver.

If you happen to be on Pinterest already, and want to check out any of the nearly 900 things I've bookmarked so far, my username is 27lisa27.

At any rate, if you're a project and resource collector like I am, you should go sign up. You'll love it.

For more WFMW posts, head over to www.wearethatfamily.com.

WFMW: Organize Your Books

Even before I had kids, I had a lot of books. Now that I have two little ones, and we're homeschooling, we're swimming in books. After getting fed up with not being able to find books that I knew I had, I decided to get organized.

(I should mention that this is one of those organizational projects where things get worse before they get better, as evidenced in the picture.)

I started fairly small, with the two bookshelves that held specifically homeschool-y books. I sorted them by subject: math, reading, science, art etc.

I did this several months ago, and can vouch for how much of a difference it makes. Now I can find what I'm looking for within a minute or two, instead of having to search through hundreds of books.

We have several other bookshelves in our house, and my next organizing project will be to sort the books on the craft bookshelf.

Getting organized works for me. For more WFMW posts, check out the linky at http://www.wearethatfamily.com/.

WFMW: DIY Dress Up Center

I love to browse through catalogs. One thing I've seen several incarnations of in several different catalogs is the dress up center, as seen here, at Hearthsong. It's a beautiful piece of furniture, but it's around $300 with shipping. Eek.
I started looking around the house for things to cobble together for a similar purpose, and ultimately came up with this:

Admittedly, it isn't as pretty as the previously mentioned version, but the price was right. (Free!) I had the extra clothes rack lying around from back when I used to sell tie dye at various events. If you had to buy one new, they're less than $20. The height on the rack is adjustable, and I lowered it as much as possible. The plastic bins were also repurpsed from elsewhere in the house, and just happened to fit perfectly. V now has a place to hang her fancy dresses, a bin for hats, a bin for purses, and another for other accessories.

Reusing stuff we already have lying around works for me. For more WFMW posts, check out http://www.wearethatfamily.com/.

WFMW: Easy Video Game Storage

We like video games around here. We have shelves on the wall to hold Wii and Playstation games, but it's hard to keep up with all the teeny Gameboy and Leapster cartridges.
I picked up this plastic jewelry holder at Ross several years ago, and had been using it to hold V's hair do-dads, but it turns out that it's just the right size to hold several Gameboys, and lots of Gameboy and Leapster cartridges. Anyone wanting to play can easily find the game they're looking for, and the whole thing is portable, which means we can take it in the car, or I can hide it in my closet when L needs a video game break. It doesn't take up a lot of space either.
For more great WFMW posts, check out www.wearethatfamily.com.

Vintage Suitcase Storage

I love wacky old stuff from the 60's and 70's.

Every time I go to Goodwill (you don't really want to know how often I go to Goodwill, do you? It's a lot...) I look for more of these little flowery suitcases, and train cases. I'm fairly picky. They have to be in good shape, and I won't pay more than $5 for them.

They're awesome for storing things in plain sight. These suitcases hold party supplies (candles, balloons, streamers,) and our seldom-used-in-Texas mittens, scarves, and hats. The train case holds crochet projects.

In a house without much built in storage, we have to get creative.

Kindergarten Organization

I've read a good bit about the workbox system, and while it sounds like a neat idea, it doesn't exactly work for us. As I related yesterday, we're only planning to hit about 3 different activities a day.

In the spirit of workboxes though, I've decided to use this little shelving unit for our weekly activities. They'll be a drawer for each day, as well as an extra to hold my lesson plans, etc, in. The idea of loading up on Sunday night for the week, and then not having to scramble around every morning to find the right puzzle, or workbook, or whatever sounds pretty appealing.

As a side note, perhaps my huge fluorescent labels will help L learn the days of the week in the correct order eventually. :)

Finding New Uses for Old Things

Years ago, my mom gave me a couple of green glass candy dishes that had belonged to my grandmother. They're nothing fancy, not depression glass, but rather pressed glass, apparently from the 60's and 70's. They're pretty, and inexpensive, and easy to find. You can find similar pieces at nearly any thrift store for a few bucks. Anyways I sort of started collecting them, and before I knew it, everyone was keeping an eye out for new pieces to add to my collection. Over the years, I had amassed a whole cabinet full of stuff, which wasn't really doing anything but collecting dust.



I recently decided I needed my cabinet space back, so I could hide the sewing machine and serger from the kids, who were always messing with them. I decided to actually start using all the glassware. I threw out our plastic cups in the kitchen, and moved in the green set. I filled bowls with seashells and rock collections, and scattered them around the house. I also used the candy dishes, and wine glasses, and so on to organize our office supplies on this shelf above the desk. The results are pretty, I think, and also functional, since it's easy to find everything now.
I used to be a pretty avid collector of useless dodads, but I've been phasing them out these last few years. There's just not room for it all.
(My book collecting, er hoarding is a different post, though...)



So what do you like to collect?

WFMW: Organize your stuff

Organization is a pretty big issue around here. We've accumulated a lot of educational "stuff", and we don't have a lot of room.
Aside from the storage issue, if I can't find something pretty easily, it tends to not get used.

I've recently gotten one little area organized, and I thought I would share. We purchased this cool little cabinet years ago from an estate sale. (Sorry about the crooked picture. :) )



Until recently, it just held a bunch of misplaced junk. I've re purposed it to hold a lot of our games, counting manipulatives, etc. I bought a bunch of plastic containers from Dollar Tree. The large ones for the sensory bins were a buck a piece, and the others came in packages of 2-4 for $1.
I printed some labels off from the computer, and labeled everything.



Large games like Candyland were taken out of the boxes. The kids always beat up the boxes anyway. You can't really see in the pictures, but the game boards are stacked in the cabinet, while the pieces were stored in either the aforementioned plastic containers, or large ziplock bags. This saved A LOT of room over just stacking the boxes.




I'm actually using a lot more of our stuff now, and it's easy to put things away when we're done.

Getting organized on the cheap works for me. For more great WFWM posts, check out the Linky at We Are That Family.

WFMW: Fabric Storage

I wish I had room for a dedicated craft room. But I don't.
Instead, I stash my stuff wherever I can, throughout our small house. I used to keep my fabric in totes, but you had to dig through all of them to find something in particular, and the totes were a storage problem too.
Here's what I do now instead:






I got an old 4 drawer file cabinet, and spray painted it, to make it less ugly. Now I "file" the fabric into the cabinet, which means if I'm looking for something, it's much easier to find. I keep patterns in the bottom drawer.

For more great WFMW tips, check out www.wearethatfamily.com