My Labeling Essentials

Today I am taking a little departure from showing you an organized space or room.  Instead, I wanted to tell you about the labeling items that are essential to my organization and how I store them.  A few months ago, I became frustrated with not being able to find labels that I had printed out.  I needed a solution for all of my labeling essentials ASAP.  I picked up a plastic caddy from Walmart and naturally labeled it my "Labeling Caddy."

I gathered all of my labeling goodies including, but not limited to, tons of Martha Stewart labels (my favorite!), Brother P-Touch tape refills, double sided tape, velcro, mounting tape, string, tags, chalkboard cards, chalk markers, mini clothespins and fun-tak.  

Everything fit perfectly into the caddy and the caddy fits perfectly in the cabinet under my "desk" in our kitchen.  I plan to write a post about my kitchen desk area, but I will wait until I have it organized more to my liking.  

Also essential to my labeling, are my two Brother P-Touch label machines.  I am in love with these gadgets!  I bought them both at Staples during label maker sales.  In the cabinet they sit next to two small bins with a few other labeling/office supplies.  

I often use my laminator for labeling as well.  It also has a spot in this cabinet.  I keep all of my laminating sheets in a magazine file along with CD/DVD labels, larger Avery labels, return address  labels and labels that I have previously printed from the Internet.  

For Christmas, my wonderful mother bought me a Silhouette Cameo!  Awesome, but what exactly is that, you ask.  It is an electronic cutting machine.  It can do so much in the way of arts and crafts, paper crafting, custom apparel, vinyl decor, scrapbook layouts and what else, customized labels!  Yay!  It will be a long while before I use this baby to its full potential, but the first thing I plan to do is whip up some vinyl labels for bins, etc.  I am beyond excited!  

That about sums up my labeling essentials!  I couldn't be completely organized without them!  

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Our Refrigerator & Pantry - Clean & Organized

Happy New Year everyone!  I'm sorry that I haven't posted in awhile.  With the holidays, I haven't had much time to do any organizing, let alone blogging.  Tomorrow begins the first full week of the new year and also the first day of my attempt at a healthier lifestyle via healthier foods and regular workouts.  I thought that was a good reason to get our refrigerator and pantry cleaned out and organized.  I forgot to take a before picture of the fridge and freezer, but just try to imagine a chaotic mess.  I told you, I am on a JOURNEY to an organized house.  I may love to organize, but that doesn't mean that my house has been organized from day 1 OR is organized on a daily basis.  Here are the after shots of the refrigerator.  Mind you, we do need to do a bit of shopping for said healthier foods.  This is after I took everything out, including all of the shelves, cleaning everything as I went along of course.  

The majority of our condiments, sauces, dressings and sandwich essentials are on the refrigerator door.

I recently bought some refrigerator bins from Bed Bath & Beyond.  I haven't really decided which purpose I want to give to each of them.  For now, I put all of the yogurt in a larger one.  The smaller one is holding canned fruits and opened baby food jars.

Our refrigerator doesn't have an ice maker or water system.  I hate hate hate that about it, but oh well.  We have a Brita water filtration thingamajig attached to our kitchen faucet.  We fill up this beverage dispenser with the filtered water and keep it in the fridge as our solution to the missing water system.

Our pantry is a set of two tall cabinets to the left of our refrigerator.  I long for a walk-in pantry or at least one that is more like a closet, but a kitchen remodel is not in our cards.  These cabinets are narrow and deep.  They are annoying in every sense of the word, but we make the best of it.  I find myself having to reorganize the pantry often.  It's one of the most difficult areas of our house to keep organized.  Here are some befores.

The usual first step to organizing a space is to remove everything.  I did just that and then wiped down the shelves.  The kids helped me by handing me the items to put back.  I used to have labels on the shelves for what I wanted to go in those spaces.  You will see that I removed them in the after simply because as much as I wanted the labels to work, they didn't.  No big deal.  Also, let me tell you about those 3 drawers.  Since these cabinets are pretty deep, I wanted a solution for at least some of the shelves.  Things in the back seem to get forgotten about.  I bought these Bamboo Roll-Out Cabinet Drawers from the Container Store when they were on sale awhile back.  They work great.  I really love them and hope to get some or similar ones for the cabinet that holds our pots and pans.

Then everything went back in in an orderly fashion.

On the top shelf, I have all of my Tastefully Simple mixes and dips, and a lone cake mix and frosting.  I also put unopened condiments here as well.

The next shelf is mainly for spaghetti essentials.

The next shelf has soups, sauces and our huge stash of peanut butter.

Next we have canned tuna and chicken, canned vegetables, beans and the "Mexican" essentials.

The first pull out drawer is a hodgepodge of sides, macaroni and cheese, salad toppings, popcorn and jello mixes.  This shelf is very miscellaneous.

The second pull out drawer is for all of our snacks.  Cookies, crackers, fruit snacks, etc.  The pro to this shelf is that the kids can easily grab their snacks themselves.  The con to this shelf is that the kids can easily grab their snacks themselves.  I also have a container of their overabundance of Christmas candy, but I keep that inside the basket on top of the refrigerator.  They definitely don't need to be able to reach that themselves.  I love the OXO containers for keeping snacks and cereal.  For whatever reason, I prefer them over the boxes that the food originally comes in.  

Last but not least is all of our cereal and oatmeal packets.  

I can officially say that our refrigerator and pantry are as clean and organized as possible.  At least for this very moment in time anyway.  I feel like if I keep it organized, that I will somehow be more willing to cook (my husband is the chef in our family) and eat healthier.  Wishful thinking, right?  

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Quick Fix Friday - Children's Books

I have long debated what to do with all of our children's books.  There are so many great ideas out in the blog world.  But all along, the answer for our family was pretty simple.  We have a wall of bookshelves in our living room (again, an idea taken right off of my first blog obsession, I Heart Organizing), and what better thing to put on it than books, right?  We read to the kids in the living room and they play in here all of the time.  The books live here along with toys that make their way in from our playroom in the sunroom, the video game systems and our DVDs.

To organize the books, we simply lined them up by the color of their spines.  We put most of the paperback books into magazine files just to keep them better protected.  The small board books went into a basket and the tiny board books went into a small round tin.  It's super easy for the kids to put the books away in the right place because they just have to stick them in with the correct color and that's it!  No alphabetizing, lining them up smallest to largest, etc.  It's been working perfectly!

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Kid Command Center

If you are a parent to school aged children, then you know that they come home with all kinds of papers from school, nearly every single day at that.  And if your children are like mine, then you do not dare throw out their artwork that they make at school or at home.  My 6 year old daughter makes or draws something every day and at some point we started to run out of refrigerator magnets, and refrigerator space as well.  Her artwork takes over.  I always wait a few days and throw some away when she is not around (we have actually started a binder for her to punch holes in certain artwork and keep for good).  I then make sure it can't be seen in the garbage.  I swear, if I don't cover my tracks she will find me out and give me quite a talking to about how to NEVER throw away her artwork.  "How could you, Mom?!!"

We had some free wall space in our kitchen across from the door to our garage and next to the door to our basement, so up went two painted pieces of trim with 3 nails in each.  On the nails hang bulldog clips and on the clips hang their artwork. They still manage to get a few things onto the fridge, but it's not as bad as before.  And I still have to secret ninja my way to discard of things here and there.  Under the artwork, we have hooks to hang lightweight coats, their backpacks and library books.  Truth be told, my husband's belts, sweatshirts, baseball caps, etc. make their way to these hooks pretty often.  His closet is in the basement, so eventually they get back downstairs to where they belong.  Please disregard the ugly brown doors and trim.  They will be painted white one of these days.

Our tall pantry cabinet is right next to this wall and the side of it was a perfect spot for our Thirty One Hang-Up Home Organizer in the Party Punch pattern.  I LOVE this thing!  Now, we do have a large dry erase calendar in another area of our kitchen where I write in everyone's activities, appointments, reminders, etc, but this wall organizer is strictly for the kids' school calendars and homework.  I had major inspiration for this layout from one of my favorite bloggers.  You can see her post over at A Bowl Full of Lemons.

I also clip up extra things that come home, such as that red note which is about this week's book fair.  There's also a little clear pocket where I keep reminders such as when my daughter has her special classes and which letters my son has for show and tell.  The kids decorated the clothespins that I use on here.

When we get home, I empty their backpacks and put any homework into their labeled pockets.  There is stays until they complete it and then it goes back into their backpacks.  We currently have two kids in school.  There are 4 pockets in this section, so I will add the other's names when they start going to school.

Underneath the wall organizer, I have their chore charts.  Over the past 2 years, I have tried a few different chore/behavior charts and rewards systems.  Some worked okay at first and then we would forget to focus on them.  It's all trial and error.  This is the current system I have.  It's only for my 4 and 6 year old.  By the time my 2 year old and 10 month old are ready for chores, I will probably have been through several more charts.  These are framed, magnetic dry erase boards that I picked up at Staples awhile back.  I spray painted the frames from black to this teal-ish color.    I simply wrote their names on each and split them into "To Do" and "Done."  I printed out some chore labels that I downloaded.  I wish I could remember where I got them, but it was so long ago that I originally came across them.  If I ever remember, I will update this post with the link.  I laminated them and popped some magnets on the back.  It's on the kids' level so they can easily move their chores from one side to the other once they complete them.  For every chore that makes it over to the "Done" side, they get a pom pom (those little fluffy balls you can buy at the craft store) in their glass jars.  I am still debating where to keep said glass jars.  For now, they are on the counter in the kitchen.  When their jar is full, they have earned a trip to the dollar or toy store (depending on my mood and my wallet :)  to choose a toy.  We actually JUST started this new system, so we will see how it goes!

Their "chores" are brushing their teeth, brushing their hair (Audrey only), set or clear the table for dinner/snacks, clean their rooms, clean up wherever else they played that day and no fighting with each other.  I can assure you that "no fighting" will rarely make it over to the done side, but it's worth a shot, right?

And here are a just few more views of our Kid Command Center.  Again, do not mind the ugly brown doors or horrific 1960's linoleum flooring.  I know, it's enough to give anyone nightmares.  I am constantly debating the blue wall color as well.  But anyway...

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