I am social and so is my clutter

I have come to a realization that there are some strong similarities between me and my clutter. Let me explain...

1. I am social and so is my clutter

I am definitely a social person. I love being around people and I am very much of the more the merrier mentality. Yes, I do like to spend time one-on-one with people too but a large social gathering energizes and excites me. Like an introvert needs their quiet time, I need my social, out among people time. How does this relate to my clutter?

January 14th is National Organize Your Home Day! Part 2

Ok, so as promised here I did P.A.R.T.Y (Put Away Random Things, Yeah!) today in honor of NOYH (National Organize Your Home) Day.

The three areas I decided to tackle were the storage shelves in my kitchen, the top of the refrigerator and the top of the washer and dryer.

Here are the before and after pictures to show what kind of difference a little bit of time and energy made in making those spots more organized.

Take a look....

The Storage Shelves in the Kitchen

January 14th is National Organize Your Home Day!

I have to admit that I did not know that January 14th was "National Organize Your Home Day" but supposedly it is. Most of these random holidays I do tend to let pass without much thought, but since I am on this "clean slate" "new organized year" and so forth path I guess I have to come up with something to organize today.....

Despite all my efforts, there will always be something that can be organized better or organized again or just plain can be organized period, so this should not be too hard. 

There is always one spot!!

There is always one spot in my house that never, ever, ever seems to be able to remain organized and non-messy. Just to set the record straight, I am in no way going to try to convince you that there is only one spot in my house that is messy. Yeah right, dream on! There are many spots. As a matter of fact, most days there are many more messy spots than clean spots at my house. 

What baffles me is the fact that there is this one particular spot that, no matter what I try to do to it, attracts clutter and chaos and mess and disarray. It is not a huge spot, but it is centrally located and it is a catch-all and I have talked about it once before here. 

Food Challenge Recap

Like I already mentioned, the first part of my food challenge came to an end a week ago. Now that I have recovered from a couple of days of intensive cooking and prepping for the rest of the month and a weekend filled with organization projects and a birthday party I am ready to recap how it went. I am going to show you what my fridge looked like after the fact. (I forgot to take a picture of the freezer and now it is packed with meals and groceries so I will not worry about that).

I am still trying to figure out this picture taking and editing thing, so please be patient with me on that. Take a look at the after pictures, this is what was left in my fridge and pantry once I had cooked my way through it :) If you want to compare you can look at the before pictures.

Monday is Laundry Day!

As I loaded the washer this morning I started thinking about how much of my time is used on laundry. Monday is laundry day...and so is Wednesday and Friday too! Granted, we are a family of five so of course we will generate some laundry throughout a week. Also, we use cloth diapers so that adds a few loads as well. But that is not all. I believe the main reason laundry takes long at my house is because of my mom. Let me explain.

My mom is responsible for.....

     *teaching me how to do laundry properly and carefully

     *teaching me to take pride in my clothes and in taking care of them

Planning, planning and more planning....it is time for some serious belt-tightening in January!

The last couple of days I have been planning, shopping for and preparing food for this month. I did one large shopping trip yesterday that more or less will be it for this month. (At least that is the plan!) There were only a couple of things left on our list and those I picked up today and now I am going to try to make it through the month without stepping foot in any store much. 

The food challenge I was doing inspired me to really plan this months meals and groceries, down to the smallest detail. As a result, I have set a very tight budget for us for the month. At the end of the month I will let you know what that budget was and how it panned out. Was I successful? What did I buy/what did we eat? and so forth. 

Jan 4th - Meals prepared ahead of time is the way to go!

Today was a relatively "easy" food day because all our meals were in the fridge, more or less ready to just heat and serve. I have vowed to myself many a time to cook in bulk, freeze meals and be better prepared. And I will try again :) New year, new chance!

I would like to note that my husband was not there for neither breakfast nor lunch today, which made those meals stretch a bit further. 

Also, even though today's meals seem entirely devoid of vegetables I will note that the besides the soup being a veggie soup the meatballs have both mushrooms and carrots in them already. But do not worry, of course I will not keep our vegetable intake this low forever, but for now I am convinced we will be A-OK :) 

Jan 3rd - Still Cookin'

3rd day of the food clear-out challenge......our meals are definitely taking on some character but we are not starving :P 

As I am preparing meals and all 5 of us are eating I am amazed at the amount of food we still have. I am thinking I might stretch it past Monday.....we will see, as there is a limit to the amount of beans we can eat in a row.

Breakfast: 

- Oatmeal Waffles that were pre-made and in the fridge

- Sunbutter

- boiled apple

Jan 2nd - Baking away

I continued my food challenge today and made another small dent in the pantry and fridge. 

Here are the items I made and what ingredients I used today:

Breakfast: 

- Oatmeal

     *oats

     *milk

     *butter

Lunch:

- "Pizza"

     *homemade dough using 1 pack of yeast, sea salt, all purpose flour and oil from the pantry

     *the sauce was half the jar of potato/cauliflower soup

     *the meatballs cut up were the topping

     *half of the piece of Parmesan cheese shredded on top

January 2015 - Starting with a clean slate

A new year has begun and this year, rather than starting with a long list of resolutions, I want to start with a clean slate and see where it takes me.

Today it took me into my fridge, freezer and pantry. 

I needed to take a closer look at what I have on hand in the food department as this new year starts, and I also want to truly challenge myself to stretch what I have to the fullest. Looking at the list it might seem like I have a lot of food, and there is, but some quantities are very small. 

The challenge now is to try to use up a lot of this food over the next couple of days and then I will post an updated list and some new pictures. Take a look below for today's details!

Progress Report

I am finally sitting down to write another blog post, despite my month-long dry spell, I am determined to get back to it. Since almost a quarter of the year has passed I decided that a recap of my progress in relation to my New Years Challenges would be suitable. I am simply walking through the challenges and how I am doing with each one:

Challenge 1 - Organization, organization, organization!

I am extremely proud to say that I FINALLY feel like I have made real progress when it comes to organization. This is mostly due to the fact that I spent the better part of spring break on a solo organization mission while my husband and two oldest kids were away at my in-laws. I will touch more on the specifics of this later, but all that is important to note is that my house is mostly organized and it is "20 minutes from company-ready" which I will also explain later. It is a huge relief and though there are some smaller projects here and there to tackle still, the HUGE ones are done!! So stop on by :) (As long as you give me 20 minutes heads up....)

Breaking up with clutter is hard to do...

Earlier today I was reading a new post on my friend Elizabeth's blog A New Version of Me (which by the way is an amazingly heartfelt blog worth reading) and she was talking about a clutter challenge she is doing. A clutter challenge! How perfect would that would be for me!! I have already admitted that clutter is a problem area of mine in my New Year's Challenge #1, so what better way to stay a bit accountable than to join in on this challenge?!

The original challenge is from a lady named SRB and she writes all about it on her blog VeggieSausages. 

The first step in the challenge is to Fess Up about our clutter....so here goes....

My dishwasher is going on vacation

Ok, so it has been established that I am in dire need of some more organization and order in my life and house, hence my New Years Challenge #1. Well, as a step in the right direction I have decided to send my dishwasher on vacation for an unspecified period of time. In other words, I am not going to buy any more dishwasher detergent now that we are out, and I am not turning the machine on for quite a while. It gets to go to a warm and sunny place and enjoy some of those fruity drinks with the cute little umbrellas. It is off duty!

New Year's Challenges

Ok, so I do not generally have New Year’s resolutions since I always feel like I will never keep them anyhow and life happens and time disappears from me and so forth. However, this year I have decided to come up with something similar. So, I have taken a closer look back at the twelve months that have just passed and I have come up with a list of challenges that I plan to face this year. 

These are not written in any particular order of importance, but here goes:

Challenge 1 - Organization, organization, organization!

I am definitely a more cluttered person and I tend to be surrounded by a lot of things, things I am working on, things I like to look at, things I never found a permanent home for, things I don’t know where came for, where are going or where belong. You get the picture; I am surrounded by things – my things, my husband’s things, our things, and our kids’ things. They all add up to one gigantic organizational challenge. This year though I am determined to take small steps towards getting systems in place that work for me and for us. They might not make much sense to anyone else, but they will hopefully make sense to us.