rachel@home

Organizing For The New Year

In the last couple of weeks, I have been slowly and sporadically making progress towards getting stuff organized.

This weekend was definitely a breakthrough!

Over the last two weeks, I reorganized both of our bathrooms by getting cabinets to go in the bathrooms. This did cut down on the amount of space available, and there wasn't that much to begin with, but it has made a huge difference in keeping the bathrooms clean.

This week, I have been tackling my bedroom. I am quite shocked at how much stuff I had managed to spread around in places where it didn't belong, and I picked most of that up and took care of it today. I even found my insurance card, so now I can go to the doctor, if I need to! Katrina looked at my desk tonight and said, "Wow, where did you put all the stuff?"

Here's the cabinets. I must say that I risked life and limb to take these pictures too, because you know that 40% of all household accidents happen in the bathroom, and the bathroom is so small, I had to stand on the edge of the tub, and use the mirror and the digital screen on the camera to point and shoot.

 

I cleaned out my closet, and thought long and hard about how many 5-foot long cable cords I needed, and in the end, figured that I could get by with just one, so I threw the other half-dozen away. My closet is not going to be your first choice of locations during an earthquake, but everything is pretty well organized in there, even if it is stacked all the way up to the ceiling.

My pièce de résistance of the weekend, however, was my solution for storing spray bottles of various substances. There's a shelf in my laundry room that has always bugged me, because it's really high up, and there's lots of room underneath it, but no second shelf, so I have felt like all that space was being wasted.

Tonight, a couple of spray bottles were sitting on top of the washing machine, and I glanced up at the shelf to grumble to myself about how inefficient it was, and I thought, you know, I could almost hang these spray bottles off the edge of the shelf, because it's one of those white coated wire shelves. So I tried a couple, and they stayed, but they didn't feel very stable to me. Then I got a big one, and it also sort of stayed, but then I had a real brainstorm. If I had hangers that would hook onto the shelf, and were bigger, these bottles would stay perfectly! It didn't take me very much time to dash off for my ball of twine and make some loops and hang up all of the spray bottles that I could find.

They look so festive, too:

Posted by Rachel at January 18, 2004 10:16 PM