Awwww yissss — it’s that time again! I’m sharing some super-speedy car cleaning tips over at IHeart Organizing!
Make sure you head over & pimp yo’ ride!!
Kitchen Cabinet Storage: Stay Glassy
Is it just me, or does it feel like there is always something new that needs organizing in the kitchen area? In our house, we have a very limited amount of cabinet space & a whole lot of stuff that needs storing! I’ve already talked about how we save space using magnetic hooks and a wall-mounted knife rack, and I revealed a few of my favorite cabinet storage tips in my first Cabinet Storage 101 post. Today, we will tackle another little area: drinkware. All class. All glass. That’s just how we roll.
Wine & Dine:
Like a box of fine wine, our stemware storage is cheap & simple. We use one side of an under-cabinet stemware rack for our wine glasses, and I added S hook shower hooks to the other half of the rack to organize our coffee mugs. Easiest double duty storage hack EVER!
I couldn’t find my exact wine rack online, but here is a similar under-shelf wine rack from Amazon. I also found these shower hooks that would probably work even better than the ones I’m using!
Swivel Style:
I like using a two-tiered Lazy Susan turntable to store our regular drinking glasses. The extra shelf helps take advantage of vertical storage space, and the turntable allows me to actually reach the items up top since I can easily spin it & bring any item to the front.
True, it doesn’t take advantage of as much space as a cabinet shelf, but it definitely makes everything more accessible than a normal shelf. (If I had to reach the back of the cabinet, I’d need to use my folding step stool every time I got a little thirsty!)
Oh, and yes, I totally use a cabinet shelf to separate my dishes. It’s so nice being able to store everything in one place without having to lift the little plates off the big plates to use them! (Sometimes the smallest things make me so happy — you know I love using those cabinet shelves for everything!)
How do you maximize your kitchen cabinet storage?
I’m sharing this post at the Organize It! link party & at IHeart Organizing!
Tagged with: creative ideas, kitchen, organizing, repurposing, small space solutions, space savers, storage
Posted in Organizing
Posted in Organizing
Bowser Beer: Basil & Chase Make a Video!
Hey guys! Today’s post is just a fun little off-topic video that I couldn’t resist sharing. As you know, we just started a new blog, Beer Brave, and my pups Basil & Chase tested out some beer that’s made especially for dogs!
Here’s the video we helped them create. The beer is called Bowser Beer, and they both loved it!
If you’re interested, you can read Basil’s complete post on Beer Brave today.
So proud of my fur babies! 
Oh, and here’s another post about how I organize their toys!
Look, Ma: No Legs! Floating Entry Organization
Last week’s super-efficient command center was the bomb dot com, and I’m back today to share another awesome entry organization idea!
The fabulously entertaining Annie from annie hearts is stopping by today to share her “shelf-ish” floating organizing solution with us:
When it comes to entryway clutter, there are typically a few common issues:
- Where do you drop your keys?
- Your sunglasses?
- The endless piles of incoming mail??
For too long, there was nowhere to put that stuff in our house. The dining table was the catch-all. This was inviting disaster. My keys would inevitably end up somewhere so weird and unlikely that I wouldn’t find them again without searching like a frantic lunatic. How many times was I late getting somewhere because I’d been scrambling looking for my keys? Shame on me.
Well dear reader, I’m happy to say you don’t need to fret about where we put our keys anymore because we got a SHELF.
Hurray!
As you can see above, the shelf lives on the “ugly-gadgets-we-need” wall with the thermometer, alarm system, light switch and doorbell (a huge steel box near the ceiling).
What thermometer, you say? You only see an alarm system, light switch and doorbell? Let’s have a closer look.
Oh, you’re right dear reader! The thermometer ISN’T there! Why, how can that be??
AHA! There it is! The thermometer was hidden behind the flowers!
[Clever girl!]
Our precious shelf doesn’t just hold our keys, it also holds our tissues:
Our mints:
Actually, the mint holder is a crystal flower candle holder that was a $3.99 thrift shop score!
Our key turtle was also thrifted:
Inside our shelf, we store all manner of things: lip glosses, sunnies (in the white case and brown basket), mints (in the blue container), and a few other bits and bobs.
On the other side is glue, scotch tape, measuring tape, a calculator, an iPod holder, and my heartrate monitor. It’s our junk drawer that isn’t a drawer.
This is one of those things we use every single day. After searching high and low everywhere, we found it at Sears. The brand is Nexxt, but I haven’t seen it in stock lately. [Ikea has similar options!]
We love it. What do you think of our foyer shelf?
Thanks so much, Annie! I love how she found such a simple, sleek way to hide & house all of the day-to-day entryway clutter (including the camouflaged thermostat!). What a great solution for entry organization!
How do you corral all of the random bits & bobs in your entry?
About Annie:
“Do what you love because how you spend your days becomes how you spend your life.”
I’ve been writing annie hearts in my head for years. Growing up, I was a wanna-be interior designer with grandiose schemes for my parents’ home, much to their dismay. I’ve been doing sewing, painting and refurbishing projects ever since my mom first sat me in front of a sewing machine and my dad taught me to use a paintbrush and a hammer.
I got hooked on DIY blogs right around the time I bought the little house on the river. Seeing the before and afters, the transformations on a dime, I thought, I’d love to do that. DIY blogging had my name—and my house—written all over it.
And so it goes that I’m well on my way to spending my days doing what I love.
Tagged with: Annie, entryway, organizing, reader submissions, simple solutions, small space solutions
Posted in Organizing
Posted in Organizing
Bingo-Inspired DIY Home Décor to Organize Your Space!
Make It Fun: Creative Ways to Tidy Your Home Through Bingo
Although bingo has been connected to home parties that can lead to a messy aftermath around the house, the cardboard game can actually help you find inspiration when organizing and designing your place!
Check out this interior design BINGO organizer from HisBirdieNest:
Image via HisBirdieNest
How to Play:
- Following the old school cardboard game pattern, this organizer is composed of six rows horizontally and five vertically.
- Assign each box with a part of your house. One for kitchen, another for your bedroom and so on.
- If the boxes exceed the areas of your home, you can allocate a specific large items in it such as the bed, kitchen sink, toilet etc.
- The rule of the game is to dot out the places you’ve already cleaned. You can put dots on as many spaces you’ve cleaned for the day.
Image via Love & Renovations
Peace of Mind Organizing created a bingo-inspired corkboard organizer. Just write down all the things you need to for the day and cover a box every time you complete a task:
(Apart from organizing our day, the online version of bingo can also help in fixing and tidying our area. Online Bingo Finder reported that FoxyBingo.com gave away cleaning prizes starting with three multi-floor Dyson DC22 Hoovers and feather dusters. The online bingo portal was known to give their players’ various home cleaning equipment, but you can also search for other items such as mops and glass cleaners from Walmart, Target and Costco.)
Decorating & Organizing Ideas for Bingo Lovers
Another DIY solution for your cluttered pens would be a bingo-designed cup. Search for a mug that you don’t use and give it a design twist using your old Bingo numbers (whether wood or plastic). With a strong glue stick, pin each number to the cup until you fill up each space. It’s best to follow a pattern for a more appealing look. Once the cup is done and dry, you can now place all your pens on it and arrange it anywhere on top of your study table.
Etsy.com has another pretty decor idea using bingo numbers. Instead of using a cup, they are selling items like this Wire Bingo Basket. It’s a handmade basket filled with sequenced vintage wooden bingo numbers. You could even use the bottom of the basket for organizing magazines & newspapers!
Image via Small Favorites Etsy Shop
Here’s a cute bingo decoupaged tray from Tattered Pearls Etsy Shop:
Have a table in need of some creativity? Collect all your old bingo cards and use it as a cover for your table. Make sure to use a plastic cover once you’ve filled up the top part of the table!
This post was brought to you courtesy of FoxyBingo.com — they’re helping us keep the lights on AND sharing creative ideas! Thanks, Foxy!!
How do you make organizing fun??
Sweet Storage Solutions: The Choice is Clear!
One of my fave bloggers, Beth from The Incomplete Guide to Living, is stopping by today with an easy, cute storage tip for organizing laundry products. (You may remember when I featured her a while back for her super cool DIY camera bag.) Beth is an amazingly creative blogger who cracks me up, and she’ll be popping in from time to time to share her favorite organizing ideas and witty writing!
I don’t know if you guys read Casey’s post on her smoothie station a while ago, but she touched on something that I identify with completely: a severe lack of enthusiasm for putting stuff away – especially if it involves anything more than opening and closing a cupboard door. For this reason, my laundry detergent, fabric softener, and whitening powder always stay out on the counter in our new laundry room.
We recently finished renovating our laundry room, and I kept seeing this when I looked through the door from the kitchen:
Hmm…not the worst view, but definitely not the most beautiful packaging in the world.
It would fit in the cupboards. But did I really want to get it in and out of the cupboard every single day in order to use it? Nope.
Can anyone guess what’s coming next?
If you guessed “clear storage jars,” you win a prize!*
*There’s no prize…..the question was a complete no-brainer.
I bought a couple of jars for the laundry detergent and whitening powder for a total of £6. The jar with the liquid fabric softener is actually an oil container that I already had but wasn’t using in the kitchen.
That makes me much happier. Something about the glass jars just makes it so much more fresh and clean.
Shall we have a recap?
Have you guys got on the clear storage jar bandwagon? What’s your favorite stuff to store/display in them?
About Beth:
I’m Beth and I’m so excited to be contributing here at Pretty Organized! My husband and I live in England in a farm house that dates back to 13th century, and we are doing our best to make it a 21st century home while maintaining the character of the house. Over at my blog, The Incomplete Guide to Living, I share all kinds of projects and inspiration from my life as a wife, mom, and decorating/DIY enthusiast!
I’ve been a Pretty Organized reader for a while, and three things made me feel an instant bond with Casey:
1) A mutual love of all things beautifully organized
2) Some perfectionist tendencies that sometimes result in procrastination and/or giant messes
3) An inclination to quote Will Ferrell movies anytime the opportunity presents itself
I’m not gonna lie….we’re gonna make a great team! (YUP!!)
Tagged with: Beth, contributors, laundry, open storage, organizing, simple solutions
Posted in Organizing
Posted in Organizing
Entry Awesomeness: Killer Command Center
The fabulous Erin from Managing the Manor is stopping by today to share her brilliant entryway organization. Check out this killer command center!
One area that we’ve always been, shall we say, “challenged”, has been our entryway. In our old house, we were limited to our wine bar in the kitchen as a catch-all. In our new house, wallets, mail, and a lot of other “stuff” had been thrown onto the edge of one of our kitchen counters. BOOO for clutter! Granted, we would try and keep it cleaned off, but it really bugged me that there wasn’t a better place to put these things.
The official office area is upstairs, but I wanted to create a space that could hold small incoming and outgoing items. The Manor doesn’t have an actual foyer or mudroom; but there is a great little corner in our kitchen, which is the first room seen upon entering from the garage.
Without further ado, here is the completed space!
The corkboard was purchased Hobby Lobby, and my gracious hubs painted it. He was working on another paint project that used white paint, so he just taped around the frame with painter’s tape and ran over it a few times with the roller. Easy update.
On the Wall:
- 2-Slot Hanging File for incoming mail by Martha Stewart for Avery
- Monthly calendar (check out her Manor Planner for more details)
- School schedules & reminders for upcoming events
- A Wall Manager from Martha Stewart keeps all of family keys corralled
On the Floor:
- An Expedit bookshelf from Ikea holds purses & her son’s preschool bookbag (so cute!)
- The baskets (also from Ikea) are a nice holding area for shoes & toys (an easy way to prevent piles of dropped items by the door!)
The brown organizer on top is another great piece from the Martha Stewart Stack & Fit Desk collection at Staples.
It holds envelopes, stamps, sticky notes, and extra push pins for the cork board.
The mason jar beside it contains pens and pencils, and the vase displays seasonal decor. I, of course, chose hydrangeas for the Summer season. They’re beautiful right now! (Agreed!)
This new center is great to manage mail items and to help keep clutter off of the kitchen counters. It’s a small space, but it really packs the punch needed in this high-traffic area! We spent about $80 on items for this space (thanks to some awesome sales and coupons), but it was completely worth it for all the nice, functional pieces we were able to find.
Thanks so much for sharing your command center, Erin!! I love that you created such a pretty, organized place to “catch” all of the incoming items that typically create clutter (shoes, mail, keys, etc.) — WITHOUT spending a ton of money OR taking up a lot of room! So smart!
About Erin (a.k.a. Queen of the Manor)
I believe that a beautiful, organized home can happen on any budget. We keep our projects low-cost by doing most or all of the work ourselves. Whether we’re rehabbing furniture, painting, decorating, or landscaping–we get through it one DIY project after another. I want to share what inspires us and hopefully inspire others.
Check out her blog, Managing the Manor, for more inspiration & awesomeness!
Tagged with: budget friendly, entryway, Erin, open storage, organizing, reader submissions, small space solutions
Posted in Organizing
Posted in Organizing
I Robot: Just Call Me Jane Jetson!
My Mom-Mom, who has always kept an immaculate home & organized her world to a tee, has always given me the same answer when I ask her how she does it all: “It’s so simple!”
And she’s right — everything is so easy now. We have machines that wash our clothes, beds that don’t require annual re-stuffing with straw — heck, there are even services that allow us to do all of our grocery shopping online!
When I start feeling overwhelmed, it really helps me gain perspective to think about all of the little conveniences and automated butlers that help me run my home. I have my own washer and dryer, an instantly-clean crock pot that serves me dinner, tons of amazing apps that act as organizers and personal assistants, we recently purchased a dishwasher (the first one I’ve owned in 7 years!), and now….
I have a Roomba!!!!
Image created using Rosie Robot illustration from My-Retrospace & product photo from Amazon
It’s The Jetsons for real. Rosie the Robot — Roomba style!
My amazing, wonderful mother bought one for herself, for my Mom-Mom, and for me. She found a really cool, easy way to buy ‘em at bargain prices (I’ll show you how), and we are all in love with our new little vacuums!
I am sure most of you have already heard of the Roomba vacuum, but there are SO many awesome things about it that I didn’t even realize.
It’s not one of those made-for-tv gimmicky gadgets. This thing is bad-to-the-bone, real-deal-Holyfield, flippin’ amazing.
It cleans better than my regular vacuum (my mom says it’s better than her Dyson!) because it can get into corners, cleans right up against the baseboards, and fits under the couch, bed, & island where my normal vacuum didn’t fit.
See those sweeping arms with cleaning bristles? They reach into & under all of those little nooks & crannies to clean out the crud!!
It automatically senses when it reaches a ledge so that it doesn’t tumble down the stairs.
Even More Awesomeness:
- It automatically docks itself on the charger when it’s finished.
- If you put it in a different room, it will just run until it completes the job, then turn itself off (I thought I would have to watch it so it didn’t go dyin’ on me, but it turned itself off on its own!)
- My dogs don’t mind it. Chase kind of avoids it, but Basil will literally continue napping while it bumps & maneuvers its way around him.
- It learns the layout of your house & gets more efficient every time you use it.
How to Buy Them for Less:
Normally, these little guys are close to $400. (Reasons why I didn’t already own one.) But GUESS WHAT?! You can find refurbished versions on Amazon for CHEAP (I think mine was less than $200!)
Search “refurbished roombas” or “used roombas” on Amazon, then click on the links in the sidebar to see more options.
It might also look like this:
That’ll take you to a page that shows all of your options.
Just keep an eye on ‘em & you can find some great deals!!
My Roomba Routine
- Empty dust pan before starting it (I’m already there, so it’s easy to remember)
- Turn on at night when I’m loading dishwasher (connecting new chores to an existing routine helps me get into the habit!)
- Wake up to a clean house!
It’s magical.
Some days, if I notice it’s a little dirty in the laundry room or upstairs, I’ll let it run in those rooms. My house has never been cleaner. Gone are the tumbleweeds of fur that collected under the sofa. Dust bunnies hanging out under the washing machine? Outta there! Peek under my bed. I dare ya. Spotless.
Watch yourself, Martha Stewart! Casey’s got a Roomba, and the possibilities are endless!!
UPDATE:
Still lovin’ my Roomba. I found this video on youtube & it entertains me WAY more than it should, so I figured I’d share it with you, too!
Thanks for the comment telling me to look up pets riding Roombas on Youtube, Stacy!
Tagged with: cleaning, products, routines, technology, time savers, tips and tricks
Posted in Organizing
Posted in Organizing
Declutter Much? Fifteen Fantastic Reasons to Clear Out Clutter
Check out this adorable infographic from Sparefoot! They shared it with me on Twitter & I figured I’d pass it along to you guys since it’s chock full of great reasons to declutter!
TIP: I always use my timer to help me stay focused when I’m cleaning (or doing anything, really!), and I just started decluttering my user manuals by downloading free paperless versions from Declutter My Life!
Produced by SpareFoot. Copyright 2013.
For more tips & inspiration to declutter, make sure you check out Dominique’s adorable video, “How To Be Happy With Less,” and Jenny’s awesome ASON Method to help get rid of clutter!
Back-to-School: Dorm-Friendly Makeup Organization
My cousin is getting ready to start her senior year at Penn State, and she wanted some help with organizing her makeup collection. She shares an apartment with several girls, so she needed something easy to move around that could stay in her room without taking up a ton of space on her desk.
Image created using product photos from poppin.com
Her favorite color is lime green, so I bought her a pen cup and bits & bobbins tray from Poppin & we repurposed them as open storage for her beauty supplies! (Poppin has so many cute products & colors! I use their white pen cup in my office.)
Here’s the cell phone photo she snapped to show her new makeup organization in action:
She can lay everything out while she’s using it, and then when she’s done, her foundation can stand on the left side of the tray & the pen cup can fit on the right side to stack & save space!
Why It’s Pretty Awesome:
- Perfect for small makeup collections (check out this organizing solution for larger makeup collections)
- Comes in tons of colors
- Keeps everything organized & easily accessible
- Stacks to save space
- No more digging through messy makeup bags!
Oh, and guess what? Poppin is offering a bunch of deals right now for back-to-school!
Poppin Back-to-School Discount Codes
Here are a few of my affiliate links for some of Poppin’s latest back-to-school deals & discounts. Grab a coupon code & get you some!
P.S. I’m sharing this at Mums Make Lists!
Tagged with: creative ideas, makeup, open storage, organizing, products, reader submissions, repurposing, simple solutions, space savers
Posted in Organizing
Posted in Organizing
