Home Remodeling Help

Is Geothermal Heat Pump HVAC Worth It?

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 05:08:36 -0600

Our furnace and air conditioner are getting a little "long in the tooth." In fact, they are original to our 1986 house. And while to my mind, the 80s were just like totally only yesterday, the harsh truth is that 24 years have gone by. We have a traditional gas burning forced-air furnace that once in a while gets plugged up with old construction debris (sucked down from the cold air returns which are only cavities in the walls) and spills water on our basement storage room floor. Other than that, it's kept on chugging along and we have our fingers crossed that it won't die anytime soon. The same goes for the A/C, which as far as I can recall has never needed a repair. (Knock on wood.)

But as time marches on we are getting closer to that day when we'll need to replace our HVAC. With that in mind, we've from time to time looked into geothermal heating and cooling systems. They are efficient and provide a "green" alternative to traditional HVAC systems. But like many green products, it can be more expensive. So if you are thinking of installing one, you ought to weigh the expenses against the return.

Geothermal systems work by using the heat stored in the surface of the earth to heat the home in cold weather, or to pull heat out of the home to cool it in warm weather. Polyethylene piping is installed under the ground or under water, and water (or antifreeze) is circulated through these pipes to either be warmed by the ground temperature (about 50 degrees) or to transfer heat from the house to the ground. A small unit in the house uses electricity to concentrate the heat and to circulate the air. More info on the operation of the geothermal heat pump is here.

As home improvements go, the geothermal HVAC system is one of your very high ticket items. Depending on what type of installation you get it may be more or less expenses. Installation types include:

Horizontal Loop - piping runs back and forth underneath your driveway or yard

Pond Loop - piping is installed under water

Vertical Loop - if you don't have the square footage available for horizontal, the alternative is to have a well driller drill a shaft into the earth for the piping to run down into

Open Loop - also involves drilling, as it uses ground water for heating and cooling

According to the Consumer Energy Center, geothermal heat pumps cost (for an "average" home) about $7500, plus the cost of installation which varies depending on the need for drilling (anywhere from $10,000 - $30,000). To reap a savings of 30-60% on your heating and cooling bill, is it worth it?

If you are planning to stay in your home for at least 5-10 years, the geothermal HVAC will probably pay for itself in energy savings. In our situation, where we are still paying off credit card bills from our kitchen remodel, it would not be cost effective to put money into a geothermal heat pump rather than paying off high-interest debts. But we are keeping our fingers crossed that the traditional HVAC we have will keep on trucking until we are able to justify the expense of a high priced heating and cooling system, and have saved up the cash to buy it.

Painting Woodwork - Tips and Tricks

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 14:31:52 -0600

Deciding to paint the woodwork in your home is a big step. Once you start, you can't stop with one door frame, or just do the baseboards. Oh no, once you start painting woodwork you are committing yourself to painting all doors, door frames, window frames and mullions, baseboards and any other type of molding or trim in the room (such as cove molding or crown molding). You may also be committed to painting the woodwork in adjoining rooms. You may or may not have to do both sides of doors.

Yet, freshly painted woodwork can really improve and update the look of your home's interior. Typically, new model homes have white woodwork. So if your home was built, say, circa 1985, it may have all oak or oak-looking woodwork, and thus it is dated. A fresh coat of white paint (following a nice coat of primer of course) takes at least 20 years of the look of the house.

After remodeling a few years ago, we made the choice to go with white woodwork in the newly re-done rooms. It took a while before we addressed the adjoining areas, including a hallway that leads from the front door to our new dining room. But the walls were looking worse than dingy (decorated by toddlers with Crayolas and a the dog wiping her face in the wall, don't ask) so when I finally made the leap to paint the walls, I knew it was time to address the woodwork as well.

Here are some tips for painting ceiling, walls and woodwork:

Prime everything that needs priming first, from stains on the walls or a dark/bright paint color, to never-before-painted woodwork. For priming, you don't have to mask anything that will eventually be painted.
When painting ceiling, walls and woodwork in the same room, start with the ceiling. A flat white ("ceiling white") paint is the best choice. Do two coats.
Paint the walls. You might use a low-tack tape to mask the just-painted ceiling for cutting in the edges, but it is better if you can just be careful. The trick to painting edges without masking is to load your brush with paint (but not so it's dripping all over the place), place it on the wall 1-2" below the place where the wall and ceiling meet, then holding it at a 45, allow the brush to fan out, so the edge of the fanned-out bristles just brush the joint between walls and ceiling. The other trick: have a wet rag handy for oopsies. Do two coats of wall paint.
Paint the woodwork. You did do a coat of primer first, right? You may have to mask the walls around the edges of door and window frames to protect your new paint job. Now, start from the inside and work your way out. If you're painting a window, start with the mullions, and the interior of the window frame. Also, work top down. This is to help you catch any drips. Use a brush well-loaded with paint, hold it at a 45 degree angle, and use long, smooth strokes. "Paint on, paint off Daniel-son." Well, paint-on, anyway. You may need to do three coats of paint for woodwork that was never painted before.
When removing masking tape, use a utility knife to score areas that have a lot of paint on them, and pull the tape of at an angle to the surface to prevent pulling off the new paint with it.

Needless to say, this is a time-consuming project, and if you buy good-quality paint which I believe is worth it (we like Sherwin Williams) it can cost $100-$200. Because you need to let the coats of paint dry between re-coats, you're looking at 2-3 days most likely. But the end result will be worth it! Here is a picture of my newly painted hallway. Believe me, it looks 1000% better than it did before I painted it, ceiling, walls, and woodwork.

Home Finances: How to schedule Monthly Bills with a Weekly Paycheck

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:51:29 -0600

When I started work for a new company back in 2000, they had a wonderful system where we'd get paid on the 15th of the month and on the last day of the month. 2 checks a month, 24 per year. They were predictable, and we never had to handle the situation with 3 checks in a month. Scheduling bills, loan payments, charitiable contributions, etc., was simple-- some became "check #1 bills" and the rest were "check #2 bills". If too many due dates fell in one half of a month, a few calls to the banks and you were able to spread out the payments evenly.

Unfortunately, they changed the system the year I started there and now they, like my current job, and many others, pay biweekly. That means the pay dates are sliding through the months and twice a year you have three paychecks in a month. There are at least three ways of handling this--

1) Don't. That is, when you get paid, line up the bills with the money and make the call on what to pay and what to defer. I really, really, don't recommend this because it's constantly a moving target. You may have two weeks with nothing due and two weeks with more than your salary due. It's dangerous to just "wing it".

2) Write down your paydays and check amount for each payday of the year. Then, write down the due dates of the various bills. This is not much different than #1, but it has the distinct advantage that you are planning for the bi-weekly feasts (no bills) and famines (too many bills).

3) Another option is to add up the monthly bills and then figure out how much you'll need to set aside each paycheck. That is, suppose the monthly bills add up to $1500. Annually, that's 18 grand, or 692.31 per paycheck if you are paid bi-weekly. Each payday, transfer that $692.31 to a bill paying account and then pay the bills from that account. You can even simply transfer this into another bookkeeping account if you use Quicken or other financial software. There may be some extra money required to set this up, but once you get going, paying your bills can be a predictable, if not enjoyable, experience.

Small Bathroom with Big Impact

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:52:24 -0600

Small bathrooms don't have to be boring. Take for instance the bathroom of our suite at the Glacier Canyon Lodge at Wilderness Territory in the Wisconsin Dells. Each mini-apartment is designed to be a home-away-from-home, and although the bathrooms have ceilings much higher than a typical home, the decor would fit in in any home with a Southwestern theme.

Here is a view of the shower. It is a basic tub/shower combo as found in the typical "kids bathroom" in many a home, but with an upgraded look. The slate-tile surround and contrasting shower curtain look rich together:

The shower curtain has kind of a "Christmas-y" look to it... I wonder if they switch them out for the seasons.

The ever-popular rain shower head is found in this small bathroom:

To be honest I was not entirely impressed with the rain shower head. It worked all right, but I didn't notice any benefit over a regular shower head. I prefer the versatility of a hand-held in my own shower at home, and when there's one in a hotel room, I at least can deceive myself that the housekeeping personnel use it to wash the walls of the shower down. What I really noticed was how hard the water was! I am spoiled, I've lived with water softeners all my life, and I can really tell when the water is hard. The soap sticks to my skin, and my hair won't rinse out. If you look closely at the walls of the shower and the shower head itself in these pictures, you can see the lime scale build-up. That just does not look clean. I think that a lodging facility associated with a water park ought to spring for soft water, but then that's me.

Here is a view of the nice granite countertop (or maybe it is quartz like my kitchen countertops) for a dual vanity. Your typical small bathroom may not have room for a dual vanity (I know ours doesn't) but I strongly believe that it's worth spending money on the vanity countertop in a bathroom. It's so small that it is not that large of an expense, but it really packs a huge impact.

(I could do without the silk flower arrangement though.)

One of the features of a Southwestern decor for a bathroom or kitchen is painted cabinets. You can see a little of that here, and the pewter drawer-pulls.

So have fun with your small bathroom. What is your favorite look? I might not choose Southwestern, but I wouldn't mind something that looked up-scale. For such a small bathroom, you can afford to splurge!

Cleaning the Refrigerator

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 21:39:17 -0600

In our basement we have an extra refrigerator. It was the refrigerator that was in this house when we bought it, and it works fine, but when we remodeled the kitchen we went with a stainless-look refrigerator (giving up, I might add, several cubic feet of refrigerator and freezer space in our kitchen to fit it into our design, since we did not want to spring for a sub-zero).

The extra refrigerator comes in handy for storing the organic chickens and turkeys we buy from a fellow homeschooling family. But when we bring home the birds it is sometimes necessary to let them remain in the refrigerator part for a few days before moving them into the freezer. That is where the problem starts... they are in plastic bags, but the bags are not leak-proof. As a result, there was quite a mess on the shelves of the fridge, and in the freezer as well since my husband transferred them directly over without paying attention to the leaky mess.

I ignored the problem for quite a while, being too busy with many other remodeling, painting and organizing projects. But I am now all about anti-procrastination. I asked my husband to unplug the fridge so it could thaw out, and intended to have him clean it shortly thereafter.

We both forgot about it. I would only remember it late at night when we couldn't do anything about it.

But finally late one night this week I remembered before we went to bed, and made an appointment to get up at 6:30 AM the next morning so we could tackle cleaning the fridge together. It had been unplugged for several days, with the doors shut... a big no-no. I wanted to take care of it before any more mildew grew.

Here's what I know about cleaning refrigerators. You shouldn't use strong chemicals. The ideal is probably hot water and vinegar (maybe 1 gallon to 1 cup ratio). I threw in a little bit of dish soap too, since some of the mess was kind of stuck-on. Our hot tap water is very hot indeed, so I felt confident we took care of any chicken messes quite thoroughly. My husband brought all the shelves, drawers, baskets and bins upstairs and I scrubbed them while he wiped down the interior of the refrigerator and freezer.

Finally, our early morning collaboration (only took 1-1/2 hours) resulted in this:

That blue box is a generic box of baking soda, just in case of any lingering chicken odors.

Now that I know I have a clean extra refrigerator/freezer, I look forward to the next chicken butchering season, when I will learn how to make our own chicken stock and keep it stored in the freezer. I know, just what everyone dreams about, right? And I'm a vegetarian! Oh but it feels good knowing your family has whole, organic food to eat. And an extra refrigerator to store it in!

How We Got Paid to Buy a New Washing Machine

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:43:56 -0600

This article has been moved to the Finance blog Funderbudget

Financing Home Remodeling Projects- The Danger of Requirements Creep

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 11:45:14 -0600

Creep is a structural engineering term that basically describes a slow slide or change. Under stress, over time, solid materials tend to slowly deform. The simplest example is an icicle under the influence of gravity. It's not a sudden fracture, but rather a slow and steady creep.

There is another term called requirements creep that descibes the tendency of project requirements to also undergo this same slow erosion. Suppose you are on an engineering team that wants to build a digital clock. Seems pretty simple, right? It needs to be large enough to read but small enough to fit on a desk. But, your team meets and at the first meeting, the idea of adding an alarm sounds good, so that gets added. At meeting #2, the alarm isn't enough, but it needs to have the option of the buzzer or radio. Then, CDs and MP3s get added to the alarm options. Subsequent meetings add battery backups, a hand crank option for emergency use, color options (not everyone like red numbers), automatic detection of daylight savings time, a date, then a calendar, etc., etc., etc..

You get the idea. Every time you get together, another "good" idea enhances the project, making it more complicated, more costly, and it will take more time to complete. The solution in engineering firms is a well defined requirements document. Once proposed, debated, revised, discussed, and finally signed, it becomes harder and harder to change it. That's because a requirements change, we have learned, is so costly and so risky that it simply isn't done as projects move forward. There are exceptions, but generally, the idea is to build to the requirements, and nothing more.

The same idea, perhaps without the formal document, is needed when you are planning a home remodeling project, especially if you are doing it yourself. At some point, you are going to reach a point when you think you know what you want to accomplish. The best advice I can give is to review what you want to do, and then do it again. Turn it over from every angle-- will removing that wall impact anything upstairs? If we use laminate flooring, what about the stairs? How important is it to really have that corian countertop with the integrated sink? Where is the stopping line?

Once you decide the requirements are in place and you start moving forward, be very, very cautious about taking anything else on. Yes, it may be that it'll be best to extend the flooring in that direction too. Yes, it's a good idea to also replace the appliances. Yes, it turns out that running the piping that direction allows for the addition of A, B or C. But, if you can, don't change the plan at this point. You run the risk of running into time delays, lack of funds, or both. Don't do something you hate just because you decided upon it a few weeks ago, but don't change everything either.

To the degree you can stick with the plan and avoid requirements creep, you'll find yourself on-time, under-budget, and confident you can plan and finance the next project accurately as well.

Garage Cleanup Begins to Take Shape

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 23:28:23 -0600

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...

How to Shine a Stainless Steel Sink

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:28:57 -0600

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!

Do you have to wash clothes before storing them?

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 15:14:22 -0600

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):

Washing clothes removes mildew spores that could take off while in storage
Washing clothes removes insect eggs that could hatch into bugs that chew holes in your clothing
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!

Gargage Organization Project Begins

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 23:34:16 -0600

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.

Childrens Clothes Storage Bins and Bags

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 21:42:22 -0600

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:

Increased protection from moisture, dirt and insects
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.

Storing Children's Clothes and Shoes

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 22:40:06 -0600

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.

Children's Clothes - Organizing, Storing and Making Them Last

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 09:13:04 -0600

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

Thou shall keep the boxes from all thy kids' shoes (so thou'll know what size they are when thou needs them).
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.
Thou shall always wash dark colors in cold water.
Thou shalt not let kids stretch out clothes that are too small for them.
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).
Thou shalt never buy more clothes only because thou can't find the ones saved from the previous kid.
Thou shall pair socks after washing, and discard the orphaned socks.
Thou shall throw away clothes have holes in them or are hopelessly stained or faded.
Thou shall donate clothes that thou never liked, are duplicates, or thou has too many of.
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.

Organizing Winter Hats, Mittens, and Boots

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 00:51:55 -0600

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.