Well, the garage has graduated from disaster to simply a huge mess.  It's actually quite the accomplishment, given what it looked like when this all started.  Today's objective was to start from the back door and get as far as I could, dividing things into

• Garbage-- preferably, this is stuff actually in a garbage can by day's end
• Recycle-- Cans and bottles can go in the recycle bin, cardboard broken down
• Wood-- These are burnable courtesy of my sister-in-law, so we can add to the bonfire
• Donations

This then left the other "stuff".  The things that actually belong in the garage.  For now, the idea is to reduce what's there to what is supposed to actually be there.  Later on we can do things like organize tools and hang rakes and shovels.  

 

After about 3 hours of work, the mission was large accomplished.  Both trash bins are full and ready for the city to dump next week.  We then have one overflow can about 1/3 full.  The recycle bin is full and there's a loosely organized pile of cardboard on the floor.  Donations are gone-- having make a trip to Goodwill and only coming back with the baby gate and stroller that they did not accept.  A bunch of larger items to dump in the trash have been identified-- old car seats, strollers, a trashed crib mattress, etc.  There are about eight florescent bulbs, one computer monitor and one microwave oven to deliver to the city recycling plant tomorrow.

It was a good start and there is a noticable difference.  I'm still not able to park a car in here, but we are getting close.  After the trash and recycles are gone, the next step is to identify a home for the extra furniture that's out there-- two bookcases and two storage lockers.  If those can vacate the center of the garage, then we'll have at least some hope of getting the van out of the elements this winter. 

Meanwhile, I can ponder what to do with the tandem jogging stroller that doesn't fold up...

Posted by Jason at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Every good woman loves a shiny sink.  If you're one of the Flylady's followers, you shine your sink every day.  I have a porcelain sink, but if you have a stainless steel sink, you may have run into some trouble trying to get the crud out and get it truly shiny.

My friend Jo, the one with the knitting blog,  has come up with a way to shine her stainless steel sink.  After trying Comet, stainless steel micro-fiber cloths, and stainless steel spray cleaner, all in vain, she finally found her secret weapon.  It was Magic Eraser's cleaner for Wheel and Tire.  It made her stainless steel sink shiny without much scrubbing.  The scum and the dullness that had been caused by coffee and food being poured down the sink, were taken away by this unexpected cleaner.  

She thought some of our home remodeling blog readers might appreciate this tip, so here you are.  I hope you soon have a shiny stainless steel sink too! 

 

Posted by Caeli at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am afraid that indeed, you do have to wash clothes before storing them.  I will tell you why.

When I took on the momentous task of organizing, sorting, reducing, and storing my children's too-small clothes, I had not planned on washing them.  After all, they had been washed before being brought back to the bedrooms last time (I won't say, put away in their drawers because many were just piled up here and there).  And I know I will wash them before putting them on the next kid who may use those clothes. 

Yet when I did research on how to store children's clothes, I found again and again that it was recommended to wash and thoroughly dry the clothes before storing them.   Still, I was not convinced.

Then I learned why they HAVE to be washed before storing (thanks to the blunt words of a professional organizer named Cynthia Braun on her website organizeyourlife.org):

1. Washing clothes removes mildew spores that could take off while in storage
2. Washing clothes removes insect eggs that could hatch into bugs that chew holes in your clothing
3. Stains, which contain bits of food like grease or other substances, or body fluids like perspiration, attract insects to clothing that is in storage

At the very least, clothes should be put through the dryer before storing, which should knock out the insect eggs.  However, that does not sound very effective to me. 

If only I had not thought I could get away with storing the clothes without washing them first... I had them all sorted into piles by size and gender.  Now, I am washing them in loads by size and gender, in order to avoid the task of sorting them out again, even though some of the loads are pretty small. 

The moral of the story is: don't hesitate - just wash the children's clothes before putting them into storage.  And dry them really well - or you'll just make things worse!

 

 

 

Posted by Caeli at 03:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you'll know that my better half has been working on cleaning up and organizing the kids clothes and generally, everything inside the house.  I've been meaning to do something with our garage for some time now and thus it's been brought into the project.  The idea is to make one stall a workshop/tool area and have the other stall as a functional place to park our minivan.  On the surface, it sounds simple enough.

However, we have a couple of challenges.  First off, it's now December 28th and the daytime temperature is about 20 degrees.  The next time we'll see the north side of freezing is March.  After all, it is Wisconsin.  So, it's a cold, unforgiving environment.  However, it is something you can prepare for.  One thing that I've learned after living out here for five years is that gloves and a good hat can do wonders for your outdoor experience.  I'm still looking for a way to keep my ears warm, but with a good set of thinsulate gloves and a hat, you can function in winter.

So with that out of the way, the other problem is that the garage is an absolute disaster area.  There are at least two reasons for this that I can think of.  First, we generate a lot of trash.  We have three little ones in the house and with a household of five comes a lot of messes to clean up.  For the longest time, we didn't have the bins provided by the city for automated garbage pickup, so we end up with a pile of garbage and recycling boxes to deal with.  Frankly, we never really had a good system for that, and thus we had a lot of just junk out there.  

Secondly, we underwent a major, major, remodeling project that we've detailed in this blog over the last 2 years.  The garage became the staging area for everything.  At one point, we had boxes and boxes of kitchen cabinets filling up one stall.  Later, we had flooring components, furniture, you name it.  It was also the workshop, especially as the weather turned.  So, we have the miter saw, table saw, etc.. out ans scattered about.  Finally, the hand tools were all over the place and we just grabbed what we needed and were not good about putting tools back.  Add to that a baby born in the middle of the project and we have the seeds for a hellish garage.  

So, we'll see how things work out.  

Posted by Jason at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my children's clothes adventures, I have completed the process of gathering all the too-small clothes, culled out the ones to donate or throw in the trash, and having belatedly decided that I really DO have to wash all these clothes before putting them into long-term storage (more on that later), I am discovering the best way to store children's clothes.

Short of buying specially-made archival bags and containers, I believe I have the best solution right at hand.  We have collected a number of plastic storage bins (Sterlite, Rubbermaid and others) and have been piling clothes and other unsorted and undecided-about items in them for years.  But as the Flylady says, "You can't organize clutter" and these bins were just containers of clutter.  It was easy to recover the ones that were holding unsorted clothes in them.  Others I found in the garage with a couple of tools in them (soon relegated to the workbench where they should have been, though the workbench itself is a study in clutter collecting), and another was being used for surplus hat and mitten storage.  I decided the hats and mittens were part of the clothing project, since some were baby-sized, so that bin was emptied out too and is now available for long-term clothes storage. 

Here is a look at one of the clear plastic conainers I am using for the boys size 5 and 6 clothes:

 

The advice I found online recommended not only using bins, but placing the clothes inside of plastic bags before putting them in the bins.  There are apparently two reasons for storing clothes in plastic bags, or Space Bags, within a plastic bin:

1. Increased protection from moisture, dirt and insects
2. To squeeze out the excess air and increase the amount of clothes that can be stored in the plastic bin/storage container.

 But which is better for bagging up clothes for storage, Space Bags or ordinary garbage bags?  I have found a use for both:

I think the Space Bag is easier to use when you have an impossibly large stack of the clothes that you want to compress to a height small enough to fit under the lid of the plastic storage container.  I had a lot of size five boys clothes for some reason, but the Space Bag fits on one side of the container, leaving the other side free for the size 6 clothes.  The size 6's were placed in a tall kitchen can garbage bag, and I leaned on it and squeezed as much air out as I could, then sealed it shut with packing tape.   It made a nice brick of clothes that fit easily along side the size 5s, so I could get two years worth of clothes into one bin.

Here is another look of a couple years worth of clothes compressed in their plastic bags and sealed with packing tape:

 

By the way, I did not separate the clothes into seasons, as I know some people do.  So far I have not seen the need to store away summer clothes in the winter, or vice versa.  I have kids who like running around the house in shorts and T-shirts in the middle of winter, and on the other hand I sometimes have to dress them in jeans and sweatshirts in June.  If your climate has a sharper division between the warm and cold seasons, you might want to store the clothes separately to make it easier to grab just the ones you need when you need them.  I also don't have that many clothes saved that it would be difficult to pull out what I need and reseal the bag with the rest of them if I wanted to.

My only problem is that I keep coming across additional clothing items in the sizes I've already sealed up.  I'll have to re-do those bags, but I can handle it.  I am making progress toward having a nicely stocked supply of clean kids clothing ready for future children, God willing. 

Posted by Caeli at 09:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am organizing, culling, and storing my children's clothes that they've outgrown, in case we need them for future babies.  Over the past two years (the years child #3 has been around to date) the clothes have been piling up in all our bedrooms, depressing me more and more every day.  When I decided it was time to declutter the house, finally dealing with the children's clothes was at the top of the list.

I began by gathering everything - mostly baby and little kid clothes, but also a few related items such as blankets, slings and baby carriers.  I went through the dressers and pulled out all the too-small clothes, not bothering to make decisions about donating, tossing or keeping at this point.  I just wanted to get them all down to the kitchen and dining room, which is my staging ground for this project.  Soon I had several clothes baskets that looked like this:



My husband and I then scrounged up every big plastic storage bin we had in the house.  I washed them with hot soapy water, then set them out all over the kitchen island and dining room table.  I stuck a quickly scribbled note indicating clothing sizes and gender, stuck them on the bins (two sizes per bin) and these became the "keep" piles.  I filled up several garbage bags and boxes for donation, which were soon loaded into the car and taken to Goodwill.  Several articles of clothing were relegated to the garbage as well. 

This was the view in my kitchen and dining room when I started sorting out the clothing I planned to put in storage:





At first I was really torn between culling and keeping clothes.  My first instinct was to get rid of as much as possible... the shear enormity of the piles made me think, we cannot possibly store even half of this, with more hand-me-downs being generated every year.  However, the financial aspect soon struck me: this is a fortune in clothes.  If anything is in pretty good condition, I should keep it.  It will save our family major moo-la someday. 

I am now much further along on this project, so I'll take some more pictures and demonstrate what I've learned about conserving space while storing lots of children's clothes. 

Posted by Caeli at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here are my 10 Commandments of Storing and Organizing Children's Clothes:

1. Thou shall keep the boxes from all thy kids' shoes (so thou'll know what size they are when thou needs them).
2. Thou shall remove all stains from clothes when they happen, and thou shalt not leave clothes stored or piled up somewhere with stains on them for years.
3. Thou shall always wash dark colors in cold water.
4. Thou shalt not let kids stretch out clothes that are too small for them.
5. Thou shall have a labeled bin ready to store clothes as soon as they are outgrown so thou won't have to wonder what size they were (because the tag is now unreadable). 
6. Thou shalt never buy more clothes only because thou can't find the ones saved from the previous kid.
7. Thou shall pair socks after washing, and discard the orphaned socks.
8. Thou shall throw away clothes have holes in them or are hopelessly stained or faded.
9. Thou shall donate clothes that thou never liked, are duplicates, or thou has too many of.
10. Thou shall wash all clothes and dry thoroughly before storing them.

All of the above, I learned the hard way.  Up until a couple of days ago:

• I had a mountain of baby clothes piled up on top of a changing table in my bedroom.  The pile reached halfway up the wall, and constantly shed little socks onto the floor. 
• My 5 year old daughter could never find any clothes to wear.  Her dresser seemed full, but everything was too small.  In fact, she really does not have many clothes; good thing it's almost Christmas.
• My toddler's clothes were overflowing out of her dresser, and another mountain was forming on top.  When I removed all the clothes that were too small, what remained fit into two of the three drawers, as well as some thing now hanging in the closet.  We never used hangers before for the kids.

Getting the too-small and junky clothes out of the dressers was a huge blessing to the kids (and to my sanity).  I just informed my 8 year old son that he now has socks paired together in his drawer, so he should wear them every day.  He opened his eyes wide and said in a hushed voice, "They're all together?"  I said yes, and he yelled "Thanks!" and gave me a big hug.  That just makes it all worth it. 

Posted by Caeli at 09:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hats and mittens can be the bane of a mother's existence in the winter time.  It was bad enough in the summer, trying to find two matching shoes to put on a child's feet, now you have to add pairs of mittens as well as some hat or other before you can let them out the door and still consider yourself a good parent.  In addition, you will at some point have to make the switch from shoes to boots, knowing full well that this means large unwieldy pieces of footwear will be standing in puddles of melted snow in your front hallway. 

After about a week of chasing after mittens and hats, I was inspired to find a solution to this problem.  We never had a single spot where the hats and mittens were supposed to live.  Putting them in the coat sleeves was not always practical, as there might be a little snow on the mittens or gloves, which would then just stay moist and make the coat sleeve damp as well.  Growing up, my mom had a dresser for hats and mittens.  The wet items could lay on top of it until they dried.  I don't have room for the dresser solution.  So I had my one organizational genius moment, and came up with the ultimate hat and mitten organizer, which each of my kids from the 8 year old down to the 2 year old can handle putting their things away in, and it doesn't really matter if the things are a little damp. 



Yes, it is simply a shoe organizer.  Each of the mesh pockets (handy for ventilation, allowing items to dry) can hold a pair of mittens or gloves, or a hat, scarf or neck gator.  My husband and I put ours in the high pockets, the kids use the ones they can reach.  I imagine that when spring finally comes, I will again put the hats and mittens and gloves away in a bin in the basement and we'll use this organizer for those multiple pairs of shoes the kids need in the summer. 

There still remained the problem of the boots, especially since we had not fully transitioned from shoe-mode in spite of several inches of snow followed by sub-zero temperatures.  Tonight, the transition was well and truly made.  Whereas the hall closet previously was a jumbled pile of boots, ski boots, dress shoes, flip-flops, sandals, and sneakers, now it is a place for winter boots and ski boots, only winter footwear, to live.  I just tossed them in there this evening, but tomorrow I will put down a throw rug for under the boots, which I will be able to shake out from time to time. 

So here is my accomplishment for today:



Not only can we find our nicely organized hats and mittens, now we can even find a pair of boots... or even go cross country skiing!  It gives one such a sense of peace, accomplishing these little moments of home organization.

Posted by Caeli at 12:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For reasons that defy understanding, we've started a project to clean out and organize the garage.  It is a perfectly wonderful project to take on, until you consider that it is December.  In Wisconsin.  The temperature tonight at 8:00 PM is 10 degrees above zero, and we will not see the north side of freezing until March.

 But we were faced with a problem.  With Christmas coming, and a new drive to finally organize and clean our house, we want to expand the storage possibilities for the kids' bedroom closets.  We have the wood to devise some great storage shelves, but not the open space to work on them.  Cutting sheets of plywood in the garage is preferable to cutting them outside, and since it's dark by 4:45 PM, it's essential to do this work where we can have lighting.  So, that means the garage.  

 But, where on earth to start?  This poor garage has been through everything.  To consider putting car in there would be a joke.  It's been a workshop, garbage collector, remodeling staging area, and everything in between.  We've noticed that once it's a mess, it's nothing to just toss the latest garbage bag into the garage and forget about it.  Eventually, it makes it into the garbage bins.  So, we had to start with the trash.

The problem then is the fixed amount of trash you can fit into a bin.  The city switched over to these bins that the automated collectors can deal with.  I hate them.  The idea is sound enough, but how do you ever purge a large amount of stuff when you routinely fill the bins with the trash of life with three kids?  Projects generate junk, and the junk can only go away a little at a time, unless we get the in-laws to help with a trailer run to the dump.

With that said, the garage is coming along for a first night of work.  We will post pictures soon, but suffice to say being able to see the floor is a good first step!

Posted by Caeli at 07:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

No offense to plumbers, but sometimes you do not need to call one!  Toilet clogs are a bad reason to have to call a professional, but I have to admit I learned the hard way one time that I did, I should have been able to avoid a $100 service call.

The problem was our toilet in the main floor bathroom was flushing very slowly, and when you flushed it an air bubble would come up (often shooting water droplets out of the toilet - gross). I figured something must have been wrong with the flushing mechanism, something not immediately apparent to the usual back-of-the-tank survey.

The plumber came, looked at it for a while, made one minor (probably inconsequential) adjustment to the chain or something, and said that with these economy low-water usage toilets (in other words, most toilets on the market today), it is sometimes necessary to hold the handle down to make sure it flushes thoroughly.  That will prevent clogs... and he said that a clog was the reason the toilet was flushing slowly and bubbling when it was flushed.

That was a very helpful tip - maybe it was worth the $100 - because ever since we've been able to maintain the toilet's proper flushing function.  Now we have to teach the kids to do it too, and to avoid using too much toilet paper, and we can avoid using the plunger, or calling the plumber, all together.

Posted by Caeli at 02:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Winter is here in Wisconsin, and the snow if falling outside.  Inside, there is a flurry of home improvement underway.  We have been bopping from one project to another, getting a few things done here, then there. The central vac is being installed, bit by bit... there are now a hide-a-hose outlet and a vac-pan installed on the first floor hallway wall.  That same hallway just got a paint job, from ceiling to walls to woodwork, including doors. 

But in the midst of this another great moment has been dawning... Flylady is back in our home.  You probably heard of her... the lady with the home organization website that sends out e-mails to people reminding them to shine their sink, etc.  I have had fits and starts with her system in the past.  But perhaps my day has finally come, because I have received a burst of energy and zeal for cleaning and organizing our house, and if I can channel it into daily routines and keep this up, we actually will achieve home organization for the first time since we've moved to this house.  

In this quest, I've been taking some free time to look online for ideas to organize various parts of the home. Today I was thinking about organizing my master bathroom.  I hate the above-toilet cabinet, it just does not work for me.  The shower and toilet are in their own room, while the sink is out in a nook that does not have a door on it, in the bedroom.  I hate that.  I guess the previous owners were going for a hotel theme?  It just makes everything stored in the drawers too accessible to curious toddlers.  

So I came across a good website, and I wanted to remember it, so what better to do than stick a link in my blog?  

http://storyconnection.net/blog/tag/cleaning/

It takes you through several rooms in the home, showing organization ideas that are possible for anyone to achieve.  I am looking forward to trying some things, and will report back as I get my own home organized.  

Posted by Caeli at 02:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)