Organized Puzzles & Games

I have quite a long list of spaces in and around my house that need to be organized or updated.  From something as big as nearly the entire garage to things as small as my glove compartment.  I tend to get to them in order of what is bothering me the most at the current moment.  Since I have been working on the storage half of our basement recently with our tool and paint organization and, practically all year, my craft corner, I felt the need to work on other things in that room as well.  When we moved into this house, the board games just landed in the basement on a bookshelf and that's where the majority of them have been ever since.  I have also been storing games and puzzles in our dining room buffet.  These particular ones are for younger players.  Since the kids play most of their games on the dining room or kitchen table (or kitchen floor, or bedroom floor, or living room floor... you get the idea), it makes sense to keep them upstairs.  Of course, pieces end up all over the place and then I just toss them in a drawer or a container whenever I come across them.  My container was getting full and therefore, it was time to take a better look at how organized, or disorganized, everything was.  

Here is the buffet in our dining room where I keep our most used games and puzzles.  This piece is from IKEA.  I didn't like the look of seeing the games through the cabinet doors, so I purchased some contact paper and covered the glass panels.  It's not my favorite contact paper print, but I purchased it on a whim through Amazon and just went with it.  A nice feature of this buffet is that the cabinets lock, so the kids can't pull out the games without us using the key.    

The left cabinet contains the games.  I was able to fit two of the memory games into small plastic containers from Michael's.  I enjoyed throwing the beat up boxes away.  

The cabinet on the right contains all of the puzzles.  Most of the puzzle boxes had seen better days, so I put them into plastic containers instead.  I simply cut out the picture of the puzzle from the box and put that into the containers as well.  The puzzles that didn't fit into my small containers, I put into zip lock bags.  I also labeled some of them with my Brother label maker.  

I am using the top two of the buffet drawers for game storage as well.  The top drawer has card games and some other random games and the second drawer has Trouble games which I took out of their boxes.  I just taped the instructions to the back of the board.  

Here is a picture of the basement bookshelf before my little overhaul.  It wasn't horrible, but it needed some work.  

I actually ended up swapping it out with a white bookshelf from the playroom that we were no longer using.  The white just went better with this particular space.  The games down here are mostly for players ages 8 and older.  As the kids get older, we will adjust what we keep upstairs.  This is a fine place for these games anyway, because this room is right off of our family/TV/bar room (don't mind the mess you see in there).  To "organize" them, I mainly just grouped them by ages (adult, 13+, 10+ and 8+) from top to bottom.  A few exceptions being some poker kits on the bottom shelf.  I keep our Checkers "blanket" game in a little basket.    

And finally our puzzles and games are looking good!  I don't think for a second that this will erase the problem of finding random pieces here and there, but I am a firm believer that when you find the right system for organizing something, it will work.  Whether I make it work because I spent a whole afternoon on it or the kids miraculously put their stuff back where it belongs from now on, it will make game and puzzle time more fun and easier to clean up and put away.  With that, one more space is checked off the list!  

Girls' Bedroom Update

The last time I wrote a post about my daughter's bedroom was over a year ago.  Back then, our oldest had her own room, while the three others shared.  I have since decided to have a girls room and a boys room.  This called for doing a complete redo in each room.  My daughter's room became the boys' room and their room became the girls' room.  My husband wasn't too happy that he had to disassemble and reassemble their furniture.  He handled that while I repainted both rooms.  It was quite a stressful week or two to say the least.  Anyway, I was never totally satisfied with how everything was set up in the girls' room.  The other week, I just decided I had to fix it.  This is what it looked like when I finally couldn't take it anymore.  It needed an overhaul full of rearranging, subtracting some pieces and throwing a lot of junk in a garbage bag.

I switched the placement of every single thing except my older daughter's daybed.  The TV was mounted onto the wall, I added a little craft project and a gallery wall and rearranged the closet.  My older daughter has a lot of little toys and she is a collector of anything and everything.  When she wasn't around, I threw so much stuff away.  Call me a mean mommy, but it had to be done.  I now have a spot for everything that we kept.  The tricky part is getting the girl to put it back.  I know that every few months I will need to purge her stuff again, but for this moment, it's all good.  Take a look around..

I still need some cord covering to hide the TV cords.  I will nag my husband about that ASAP.  

The closet is going to be a work in progress for a little while as far as clothing is concerned.  I have been wanting to start hanging more of the kids' clothing, so this is the start.  My younger daughter's clothing is all still in the changing table dresser drawers which is in the boys' room.  Once she is potty trained, I will move her stuff into this room, but for now it makes sense to keep it in the changing table.  

The top bins store a variety of items.  From the left, they contain clothing for my younger daughter in the next size up, young girl's makeup and jewelry that I don't prefer either of them to have without my help, and arts and crafts kits.  I used some Target Dollar Spot chalkboard labels to label them.  The pink basket has some drawstring backpacks and other little bags in it.  The purple container houses the Rainbow Loom. 

The Closetmaid cubes on the bottom contain my daughter's collection of goody bag toys (you know, all that junk from birthday parties), headbands/hair accessories, purses, dress up clothing and accessories and doll clothing.

The small bookshelf just outside of the closet is where we are keeping some of her little art projects, books, legos, doll house toys and a variety of other little creatures, aka McDonald's toys.  Ahh.  That string of lights is looking awfully fluorescent in this photograph, but I can assure you that they are a pretty pink color and give off subtle light.  

My daughter's daybed is from the Hemnes line at IKEA.  I love that it has 3 large drawers underneath.  In these drawers are barbies and accessories, pajamas and extra sheets and blankets.  

I moved the desk over to the corner under the window and got rid of the little cubbies that we had over it before.  The cubbies just didn't work in the space anymore.  I am sure that I will find a new home for them soon.  On the desk, I just have two boxes to keep paper, pencils, crayons, notebooks, etc.  My older daughter doesn't use this for homework, but she likes to sit at her little desk and do art projects here and there.  A broken jewelry box somehow made its way from the garbage back to their room.  Until I can pull a ninja move and sneak it back out, it has also found a home on the desk.  Trinkets galore in there.  

I got this cute latch box from the children's decor section at Target.  I love it.  

I whipped up a little tassel garland to hang over the crib.  Truth be told, I first hung up my gallery wall over the crib and THEN thought about glass picture frames falling on my toddler.  These tissue paper tassels are out of her reach, so I feel much better about this than the gallery wall.  This was super easy to make and you can find tutorials all over Pinterest and YouTube.  I made mine using an HGTV tutorial here.

The gallery wall could very well be my favorite part.  Some of the frames I had in their room already and the rest took a few clearance frames from Target and some shopping through my own home.  The small dog canvases are from Target.  My younger daughter LOVES dogs, so when I saw these, there was no way they weren't coming home with me.  The colorful frame in the lower left is from one of my daughter's arts and crafts kits she got for her birthday.  She chose the picture of her sister to put in it.  I don't remember where I got the Ariel sign or wall stickers.  The silhouette of Ariel was an Etsy purchase, but I am not sure of the shop.  It came with immediate downloads of most of the Disney princesses.  Neither of my daughters has a favorite princess at this point, but my favorite princess is Ariel.  They don't seem to mind.  :)

I love this "magazine cover" with Ariel on the front.  All of the story titles are adorable!

And that's about it for the room update!  So far, so good.  I like it much better than what we had going on before.  Stay tuned for some more room updates as I have recently done mini makeovers in our living room and master bedroom.  Have you been doing any room updates lately?

Organized Tools & Paint

I am finally at peace with this corner of our basement!  It has been driving me crazy pretty much since we moved in over 3 years ago.  Unlike many of my other organized spaces, this one isn't exactly the prettiest to look at even though it is organized.  It's tools and used paint cans.  They just aren't pretty things.  The work bench and old desk could use facelifts, but I have other things to do.  Anyway, when I told my husband I was going to organize the tools, he wasn't too happy about it.  He thought it was fine the way it was.  He could find things when he needed them.  This space is right next to my scrapbooking corner and I don't know about you, but I cannot concentrate in a room that is cluttered.  Something needed to be done.  Here are a few befores.

Ack!  Seriously, why even have the pegboard?!  I don't really know much about tools.  I can use a screwdriver and a hammer, but that's about the extent of what I know.  So to start, I gave the pegboard two quick coats of some leftover gray paint and I divided everything up into piles on the floor.  Whatever looked alike went into a pile.  I then asked my husband to, GASP, purge some of the tools.  It was hard for him to do and you will see that we still have more than enough of certain items.  But all of the drill bits are put away, nothing is in a drawer where it is out of sight and out of mind and all of the old, rusty tools are out of here!  The paint bin has been separated into different, smaller bins and everything is easy to find.  You will notice that we have two drawer organizer units along the right wall.  Those were here when we bought the house and they are still full of the miscellaneous parts that the previous owner had in them.  While I would really love to organize and label everything, I just haven't had the time yet.  That is a very tedious job that is low on my list of priorities.  Maybe one day it will be flawless, but definitely not today.  Anyway, let's take a look!

The big container under the work bench is our outdoor storage container.  We have it here for the winter.  It has our patio table cushions and outdoor accessories in it.  On the shelves, we have toolboxes and electric tools in their containers.

The pegboard, work bench, old desk and most of the pegboard hooks were all here when purchased our house.  There was also a small metal cabinet.  I used what I had of small plastic containers and organized and labeled a few things in here as well.  

I decided to store all of our paint cans and accessories on the old desk.  Prior to this we had all of the accessories in a huge plastic container and it was just ridiculous.  You couldn't find anything easily.  So I divided everything into containers labeled rollers, samples, sanding, spackle, brushes and roller covers.  I also hung painters tape, a 14-in-1 paint tool and can openers on the pegboard.  I am keeping all of my paint swatches in the desk drawer.  The other drawers no longer have anything in them.  Everything that was in them wasn't being used, so why bother.  So much better!

My husband wasn't too excited about me organizing the tools, but he sure isn't complaining.  Like I said, it's not the prettiest organized space in the world, but it works for us!  I spent the past 3 weekends working on this and I am happy to be done with it!  One more time, before and after.  Yay!