Kids' Clothing Organization - Part 3

I finished doing the inventory for Annabelle's clothes, and I have a shopping list all made up. Charlie needs the most clothes, but Annabelle needs almost as much; it's probably because they actually grow, haha!

I also sorted through the huge pile of stuff to get rid of. I came up with a box of clothes to take to Kid-to-Kid to sell. Their inventory was full, though, so they only bought one thing! I got less than $5... I was really hoping for, and expecting, more than I got, so I was really disappointed when I left. I was able to buy one pair of pajamas for Joseph with the store credit. They are a bigger size of his current favorite pajamas, so that worked out really well. Everything else was taken to DI, so now the living room is back to it's normal state of chaos, which is way better than it was.

I don't know if I want to drive all the way out to Kid-to-Kid to shop again, or if we'll just get the rest of their clothes at stores in our area. But that's all that's left! Shopping! Next week when we get the rest of our school loans, winter clothes shopping is on our to-do list.

Kid's Clothing Organization - Part 2

It took a few days, but I got ALL of the kids' clothes clean. Then I went through and inventoried the clothes Joseph and Charlie have for the winter. I'm using an Excel-type program to make the inventories in. I have each type of clothing (shirts, pants, etc.) and how much they need of each item in the rows, while the columns are the sizes. I would put it on here if I knew how to, but I don't know how and I don't really want to try figuring it out right now. I also finished going through the rest of the baby and girl clothes.

Annabelle's grow-into bin.

 Baby items that are used for either gender, which I'll gather as Charlie grows out of them.

 All the girl bins, ready to go into the attic.

I'm already part of the way through inventorying Annabelle's clothes. I'm getting so close to being done with this project!

Kid's Clothing Organization - Part 1

When I was first cleaning and organizing the kids' room, I pulled several disorganized boxes and bins full of clothes out of their closet. The pile of clothes sat in the living room for a couple weeks, but last week, I decided to start tackling it.

In the middle of the sorting process.

I've been sorting through the boxes and organizing them. I sorted out stuff I didn't want to keep and then sorted everything by size.

My growing pile of giveaways.

I've been concentrating mostly on the boys clothes first. After a few days of sorting and organizing, I think I've taken care of most their stuff.

These are the bins that will be going up to the attic until their needed.

And these are the ones for putting the clothes they are currently growing out of and into, which are kept in our storage closet.

As part of the project I'm also inventorying their clothes for the upcoming season, so that I know they have everything they need for the winter. This means A LOT of laundry because I haven't washed clothes in forever. So that's what I've been working on the past week, along with being sick.

Toy Organization - Part 1

On Saturday, I wanted to find one of Annabelle's bracelets so she could wear it to church. I went in their room to check the toy box, but I couldn't find it. Their room looked like this:

We bought Joseph the loft bed the week before, but I never finished putting the room back together, so that made things even worse. I realized how much their toy mess has been driving me nuts. Even if we tried to have them clean their room, there wasn't enough room in the toy box for everything, so it could never really get clean.

I decided it was time to do something about it. First, I went to IKEA and bought this (but I got different buckets):

Putting it together on Saturday afternoon just about killed me! I'm just such a weakling! My muscles were so sore on Sunday. After it was together, I started sorting through the toys and organizing them. I have a bag of toys that are going to DI as well as a box of toys that will go up in the attic for a bit.

As I started getting toys put away, I realized that I didn't like the layout of the room very much; some things were hard to get to and some things just didn't have a place. I have had too many disastrous attempts at rearranging rooms only to find out the arrangement won't work, so I decided to make a plan. I measured everything and made a floor plan on graph paper with each square equal to 6 inches. It seemed like my idea for the room arrangement would work, but I wasn't sure, so I decided to take my floor plan idea one step further. I made a floor plan with each square on the graph paper equaling 1 inch. This floor plan did take me over an hour to put together, and now it's in the trash, but it confirmed that my arrangement would work, and that's what I wanted.

In my next post, I'll have pictures of the new arrangement, each of the toy areas I tried to set up, and, hopefully, a printable of the labels I made for the toy storage.

Project Blog

After much deliberation, I've decided to have this become my project blog. However, I will still try to do a variety of things and try a lot of new things out as well as labeling what hobbies pertained to each project. I'm excited for this new direction, and I'm currently working on a project that I should be ready to post about by the end of this week.

Direction Needed

In case you haven't noticed, I've taken a couple weeks off of trying hobbies. I was starting to feel pressured, so I was forcing myself to try to do "something" every day ,and feeling guilty if I didn't. I didn't like how things were going, so I decided to take some time to think about my options.

1) Continue on doing more hobbies after the vacation I've had.

2) Go back and do a second week of the hobbies that I enjoyed or didn't really experience much of.

3) Start "pinteresting," which would just mean me trying out different projects from Pinterest and blogging about them. This would also end up covering many of the hobbies I have tried or was planning on trying.

4) Keep track of other projects that I've considered working on. (Recently, I've been looking out for nightstands to put in our bedroom.)

I'm not really sure where to go with this. I guess I feel that if people are actually reading and enjoying this blog, then it would be good to continue on with it, but I'd want to blog about what my readers found interesting. Give me some input, please?