My Closet Makeover

July 2, 2015July 2, 201526 Comments

I’m finally back! Nothing against the blog, but work has gotten me extremely busy and it has been hard to find time to write something for the blog. But, I got a day off from work and finally found time to get something together…

My closet.

My closet is atrocious. For more than one reason.

1. I have too many clothes and shoes. I need to go through them and get rid of some of my things.

2. I don’t have that much floor space because of all the shoes on my floor.

3. Even though I have the most clothes out of all of my roommates, I have the smallest closet. That would be thanks to having the wonderful water heater in my closet. Yeah…

So I took time go through my clothes. I organize my shirts by color, so I took out the shirts by color and went through a process of getting rid of them. My criteria to keep a shirt was: do I like it, is it long enough (I’m tall), does it still fit, and is it still fashionable. I tried each shirt on unless I knew for a fact that it still fit. I also went through dresses, skirts, and tank tops the same way.

I then went through the tee shirts that I own. Now, I am proud to say that I have a very large black tee shirt collection, but I got rid of a few that I know don’t fit or that I don’t wear. I also had some smocks that I had for work before we got new shirts that I was able to get rid of.

Now, the prized possession of my clothing, shoes.

A Mess in my Room

Before I started, I took all the shoes out of my closet and off of my shoe hanger. When I brought them out into my hallway to put on my staircase, I made quite a mess…thankfully I don’t have a downstairs roommate as of the moment, so it’s okay to make a mess.

A Mess in the Hallway

But here are all my shoes. All 60 pairs of them.

So I went through them and was able to take my shoes collection down from 60 pairs to 43. Honestly, I am pretty proud of myself. It is hard for me to get rid of shoes.

I still have a lot of shoes

So, here is everything that I am getting rid of.

And here is what my closet looks like now!

There is actually space that I can walk on the floor and put new clothes in the closet. I have my work shirts separated from my tee shirts so they don’t get lost, and I am able to add new things if needed. What a difference!

Have you gone through your closet and what kind of stuff you have gotten rid of?!

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The Messy Side of Life

June 15, 2015June 15, 2015Leave a comment

I have quite a few projects going on right now and during the summer I try to get my scrapbooking done from the past year. I am kind of behind since I haven’t even done vacations from last summer! But my goal is to get caught up! This is the desk where I plan on scrapbooking.

Nice and neat.

My friend L commented how my rooms always look so nice and neat and how she wished her house looked that way. Well, I set her straight right away! Friend, I only move stuff out of the way or into drawers when I take the picture so it looks that way! Isn’t that the life of a blogger? So, to show her the real thing, here is the desk today! No, I didn’t add stuff to make it look worse, it really is this bad!

What a mess!

There is so much stuff here, it’s going to take awhile just to clean it up before I can even get started on the scrapbooking! There is stuff from Haley’s graduation (almost a month ago!),

Graduation stuff

A pile from redecorating my bedroom. I am not sure what I am doing with this yet.

More!

Here are some papers Lauren used for a school project (a month ago), some clear page protectors and my paper cutter I used to cut out tags this past weekend.

and more!

And this is just a pile of random papers I need to go through! Yeah, I think I have some work cut out for me! I will let you know my progress. Hopefully it will only be a few days! 🙂

A few days later…..

It’s done and ready to go! It really didn’t take as long as I thought it would. I just needed to put things in their proper places :). The graduation things are ready to be scrapbooked, the piles are no more, even the pile on the floor is gone. Now it’s ready for some serious scrapbooking!

Much better!

Scrapbooking time!

I have more projects coming soon! Stay tuned!

Sum Sum Summertime Backyard

June 8, 2015June 8, 201519 Comments

It’s officially summer! The preschool I teach at is now in its summer session! No more curriculum! Yippee! Just fun stuff now, like water play and field trips. To celebrate, I invited the other teachers to come to my house for an ice cream social. Just a casual get-together to relax and enjoy each others company. Since I haven’t really shown you my patio yet, I figured this was the perfect opportunity! You saw a little bit with Haley’s graduation party, but this is how it looks most of the time. I still used a few of the decorations because they fit my color scheme too.

Our pretty patio!

I am searching for a great old table, but this folding one does for now. I added the new chairs I bought at Junk Days (I haven’t recovered them yet) and a few other wooden chairs from the house. I covered the table with a turquoise and white tablecloth and a runner of turquoise, blue and lime green. My husband didn’t want the tool tray anymore, so I snagged it and painted it! I added a little burlap, some seashells and a few other baubles.

Seashells in an old tool box tray.

Sunny Days!

Off to the side, I have a potting table my husband and I built out of old pickets from a neighbors fence. It took me about a year to come up with something to make, but I love this table! We have used it for so many things, but it usually holds drinks for parties. This party was just water, since we were having ice cream!

Potting table/drink station

I added some chrysanthemums I received from one of my students and placed them in my old wooden ice cream bucket from my grandma.

Love this bucket and the flowers look just right!

There is also a wooden star and a chalkboard sign letting everyone know this is the drink station!

Cool down!

I’ve collected a few hanging lamps over the years, so I hung them from a branch in the tree above. Next to the table is an old bike I have had for years. When the kids were little, I had their little seat on it and we went for bike rides. Miss those days! Here’s the other old bike I have. This was my dad’s when he worked at an oil refinery here in my town. He rode this trusty bike all over to get from one side of the site to the other. I brought it home last year, touched up the bright yellow paint, and display it in my yard. I love that this belonged to him and I can have a piece of that history.

Dad’s old Schwinn

On this side we have the seating area. I received the iron furniture from my mother-in-law, but the cushions were not my style. So I bought some outdoor fabric and recovered them. This is not as time-consuming as it sounds, because I use hot glue, no sewing involved. I showed how this is done here.

I love the sayings on this pillow. I sums up summer for me!

Birds that sing, butterflies, sunshine on shoulders, budding branches, warm breezes, blue skies, fresh air

This bowl contains rocks we have collected from the different places we have traveled to. I have the place and date written on the rocks. It’s a fun way to relive some of those great times together!

Rocks from our trips

This deck is right outside our back door. A friend helped Steve build it about 3 years ago, and it’s been wonderful. It’s a great place to sit and relax at the end of a busy day.

Our deck

The sun has gone down and now the lights are on. I love how it looks at this time of the evening. It has great ambience and it feels peaceful. The long day is done.

Relax under the lights.

This picture is a little dark, but you can see all our delicious toppings for our ice cream. Everyone brought a topping, while I supplied the ice cream. It was scrumptious!

Ice cream toppings

Well, the party is over, but I will leave you with this last photo. I picked up this broken chair and spray painted the seat with chalkboard paint. Now we can announce where the party is and when it’s time to go home.

Broken chair

I hope you all have a great week and a wonderful summer!

March Organization-Part 3-Hallway Closet

March 9, 20155 Comments

Hi all! I thought I would share our third post about organization today. I actually had this done for February, but then Lauren decided to post about her fabric, which you can see here , and our first project here, and I didn’t want to bore you all with our messiness! It’s pretty warm here in Central California, so I won’t be needing my scarves and gloves anymore this year, but I didn’t have a good way to find the one I wanted or an easy way to put them away. Pretty soon, it became a jumbled mess! This is the closet in the hallway. It stores our coats, vacuum, wrapping paper (some day, I want to come up with a place to put a wrapping station), other misc. stuff, and my scarves and gloves.

Not too easy to find the scarf I want!

Haley had cleaned out her closed a few weeks ago and gave me this shoe organizer. At the time, I wasn’t sure what I could use it for, but it was such a nice bag, that I kept it and hoped inspiration would hit! Sure enough! While trying to pull out a scarf one morning, I thought, “This is ridiculous! There has to be a better way! Wait, the shoe bag from Haley might work!” I can’t believe it took me years to figure out that there was an easy solution.

First, I removed everything off the door, including the old hanging rack. I had some overdoor hangers, so I didn’t have to make any holes in the door, but you can just as easily hammer in a couple of nails or put in some screws. I hung the shoe organizer and I started with the gloves and mittens and put them in the top pockets. Then I took each scarf, rolled it up and placed it in a pocket. I also had a few of the small nylon backpacks that I added to a few spaces.

Lauren knitted this blue one for me!

Love these colors!

Tassels!

And that’s it! Pretty easy and it didn’t take very long at all! Now everything is put away for the year and will be ready for next winter season. What are some of the ways you stay organized with your winter wear?

The Fabrics of Life

February 16, 2015February 25, 20153 Comments

Do you ever have something that you will get as much of as possible if you get it for free or really cheap? You know, like food or clothes or home decor. If you don’t have something like this, you are lucky. But if you do, you know my pain.

Because for me, this addiction is fabric.

I love fabric: to decorate with, to make clothes with, or even to make pillows with. I have fabric that I won in the Make It Yourself With Wool contest, I have fabric that I have bought from JoAnn’s or Hobby Lobby, and I have fabric that I have gotten for free from other people. And it would be okay if I actually had a use for all of this fabric. But for now, this is what my fabric closet looked like.

Now, I did bring some of this fabric to my apartment to try to sell rice bags to fellow students and friends. But, it didn’t really work out…so I brought it all home and made this mess in my fabric closet. And as I looked at my fabric, I decided to organize it all to put into a nice neat closet.

I took all the fabric out and nicely threw it on the floor. This way, I was able to start fresh in the organization of my fabric closet. As I started to put some of the fabrics away, I went through and found some that I didn’t want to keep anymore. Either they weren’t my style or there wasn’t enough fabric to try to make something out of.

So here is my clean closet!

Let’s start from top to bottom. On the top shelf I have the neutral colors: black, white, and brown. I also have wool on the top shelf that wasn’t long enough to put on boards and stood up on the bottom shelf. The second shelf has all of my pink, red, and purple fabric. These are my favorite colors, so they got a shelf to themselves.

The bottom shelf has the blues and greens and also some small boards that were too small for the bottom shelf. There wasn’t too much, so it isn’t too crowded. The bottom of the closet has all the boards with a lot of fabric on them. Some of these are cotton fabrics, some are wool, and then there are other miscellaneous fabrics.

My fabric closet looks so clean! I am happy that I set aside a little time to organize this.

But I need some help. I have these two fabrics that I absolutely love, but I have no idea what to do with them. I am looking for suggestions on what to do with this fabric. If you have any suggestions, please write them in the comments.