My break from blogging

This post seems so hard to write. As some of you may have already noticed I haven't wrote on here in quite awhile. Our family has recently been hit hard with some hardships. Some are health related and some are just personal things we are having to deal with. So after much thought I've decided to put my time and attention on these things we are dealing with and to put my blog on hold just for a bit.

I hope to be writing more posts by the beginning of July or even sooner. I just have things on my plate right now that I really need to take care of. Please stick with me and continue reading my blog! I will be back soon!

Allie

Organizing my kids' room - part two

So part one of organizing my kids' room I showed you the diaster of a room my kids' had. Toys toys toys galore! You can see it here. I got rid of a lot and I tried to only keep their favorites. I made a place for everything I kept. So instead of every toy being thrown in a bin like we have done in the past, everything now has a place. And I've got to tell you, the boys are actually keeping their room clean. Whooohooo! It's so nice. They now know where everything goes so when I ask them to go clean their room, they go do it.

On this side of their room you can see their tool bench, their guitars, the zebra, their tent, and their kitchen. Boys like to play cook too! All their play food and plates and stuff are in it. 

My boys loooove playing with play tools and play bolts and and nuts and stuff. Before nothing was ever put with their little tool bench. We were always looking for the parts to go with it. It drove me nuts! (hehe. Ok sorry I just typed that out and then proceeded to laugh at myself for the unintentional pun there. Yes I am that dorky.)

I put the tools in the little drawer except for the drills, they went on the bottom shelf.

Then I divided up all the "building materials" into these little buckets their toys came in. 

This is their little toy organizer thing. We have had it for about a year. I bought it because we were in desperate need of something for their toys and this was cheap. 25 bucks at Walmart. I really really want to buy them a white cubbie shelf (sorry I can't think of a better name for it). You know the kind of ones they sell at IKEA and Target? You can put baskets or bins to hold their toys. I'm planning on buying one of those for their room to replace this thing. It's really falling apart, it was only meant to be a temporary solution til I could afford something better. 

I put their books in the bottom basket, puzzles and spiderman toys in the middle ones, and their legos, dinosours, and other favorite toys in the top ones. Next to it is their wagon of big legos. 

I put a few toys in their tent.

On one side we have their Lion King rock, Lion King toys in the blue bag, 2 ABC School Buses, 3 Balls.

The other side we have their Elmo toy, a big dinosour toy that used to be their daddy's (it's from Jurassic Park the movie haha), and three trucks.

Under one of their beds I stored their Buzz Lightyear wings. 

Under the other bed went a SpongeBob pinball toy, two containers that each hold 10 cars, and in the green bin is their Toy Story toys. 

On the side of the room with their beds we have their Toy Story table a friend bought them, with the Hungry Hungry Hippo game set up there so they can play it anytime their hearts desires. We also have a little toy keyboard and stool, a Toy Story Chair (Buzz Lightyears and Woodys' chair to be exact) and their Toy Story backpacks that have their Spiderman outfits in them. 

Can you tell my kids love Toy Story and Spiderman yet??? I know I just literally named every toy in my kids' room, but you know what? I'm really proud that I can name all their spots, instead of before when I didn't know where anything was! I didn't show their closet, but it just has a few of the "bigger" toys that I'm saving for the baby. 

Here is what my kitchen looked like last week when I was doing this. There was some craziness!

Those are all the piles of things to sell, things to give away and things to keep for when the baby gets older. Thankfully I got all that junk stuff moved last week when I cleaned out their room so I now have my kitchen back. 

Now that I have the toys under control I want to start decorating in there. A few things on my list is to put some things on those bare walls! I just kept the same blue color that was there when we moved in. It was a little boys room then too. I'm wanting to go in and paint some Toy Story clouds on the wall behind their beds.  I also want to hang some shelves, put pictures and etc. on the walls. Later on I want to get the bookshelf with cubbies like I mentioned earlier. I want to hang up curtains to match the green ones on the other window and also in front of their closet. When they get a little bigger I'm wanting to get them white wooden bunkbeds. 

So those are my plans for the room and where everything belongs in the room. 

Am I like the biggest dork alive that I'm so excited about everything having a designated place and my kids are cleaning their room now??

Organizing my kids' room - part one

Ok so I just realized I am going to have to split this post into two parts. Why you ask? Well, apparently I got a little camera happy and took about a gazillion pictures of getting rid of clutter and organizing my kids' room. 93 to be exact. And once I narrowed them down a bit I was still left with 23 for the blog. Uh yeah that's a lotta pictures for one post.

 And the really sad part about it, some of my pictures turned out horrible! I'm still trying to learn how to take good pictures of rooms and parts of the house. So please forgive my picture quality here! I took the before pictures in a big hurry too so I think they may be the worst.

My kids' have (or I guess you could say had) a crazy amount of toys. It was bad. I've been meaning to get rid of some of them since before I was pregnant with my third. And he is now three months. So this is about a year in the making? For some reason the color in these before pictures look so funky!

Some of the toys have a lot of pieces and they all got jumbled together with the other pieces of toys, stuffed animals, books, puzzle pieces and all kind of stuff. When we would try to clean it up, instead of separating and putting things together, the toys would all just wind up in a big toy bin or bucket or just anything to hold them. So it was just a big crazy mess. It looks so embarrassing! 

My first step was to make "piles" of toys and start sorting them. This took a while.

This is what the room looked like midway through. Scary huh?

After I sorted all the toys, I could see how many spidermans they had, how many cars and so on. So that's when I started making piles for give away, sell, and put away for later. I made the baby his own little pile of babyish toys for when he starts playing with them. I also just threw away a bunch of stuff with missing pieces, broken things and stuff like that.

This is what I ended up with

Much much better right?

Part two of this is going to be more detail about where all the toys went and a few of my plans for the room. I really haven't got to decorate it like I've wanted to yet, I've got some ideas for it tho. 

I'm just so happy I can actually see the floor now! hehe 

It's soapy!

Here is a little tip on saving money on your foamy hand soap. You may already be doing this. I didn't know about it a couple months ago. One day when we ran out of hand soap my husband told me a trick (I guess you could call it that?) someone told him about making your hand soap go further. After he told me I was like "Oh duh! I should have thought of doing that! I wouldn't have bought all those bottles of foaming hand soap over the years".

You just buy a foaming hand soap dispenser (which I had already bought) and you fill it with a little bit of dish soap and slowly put water in it. Then turn it upside down and back and forth to get it mixed together. And voila! It is a whole new bottle of FOAMING hand soap.

It really doesn't take much dish soap. At first it freaked me out a little bit. Being the germ freak I am. I was like "will it be good enough to clean our hands with?". But, the more I got thinking about it, the better I felt. Because, dish soap is already really concentrated. And I've heard it's not so much about the soap that removes germs anyways. It's the water and friction of rubbing your hands together. And if you think about it, when you buy the foaming hand soap at the store, it's really made of a lot of water too. I'm still careful about not diluting the soap too much because I am sort of this germ freak. ;-)

But honestly it does feel really soapy (is that a word?) even tho it's a bit diluted.

So that's my little tip I wanted to share....And do you remember me talking about organizing/decluttering/cleaning my house? Well, I finally got the kid's toys in their room done! Whooohoo. It's been a long process, which means they had too many toys. But, it's finally under control and I'm about to take some pictures to prove it! So I will have that post later today. Aren't you just on the edge of your seat excited? Haha!

Sharing with:

Frugal Friday @ The Shabby Nest
It's a Hodgepodge Friday @ It's a Hodgepodge Life
Show and Tell Friday @ My Romantic Home
Flaunt It Friday @ Chic on a Shoestring Decorating 

Toys Toys Toys

Today I worked on organizing/decluttering my kids' toys. Whew! Like I mentioned earlier at this post, I have A LOT of spring cleaning to do. I started with the kids' toys because as many parents know, they multiply and take over fast!

So here I am today all working on getting rid of some toys, and my husband comes home with a box of HIS old toys! I really don't mind him giving the boys his old toys, in fact I really do like it that they play with their daddy's toys. But, the timing. Oh my! Now the toys daddy gave them are all over the living room.

Yeah it really doesn't look like much from the picture, but there is A LOT of my husband's old toys. Lots of little toys too not even shown.

My husband found his two game boys he used to play. And I'm talking old school game boys. Our boys are only 3 and a half so they could care less that they are so old. They love them. 

So anyways back to organizing their toys, I still have my work cut out for me. They have about a gazillion toys and it's just craziness! I thought I could tackle all this today, but I was wrong. It looks like it may be a two day job. Tomorrow is going to be full of more toy purging. I will have some pictures in my next post to show you what I'm talking about. 

I'm thinking about making a trip to Target tomorrow to get something for the living room to hold a few toys. I really would like something pretty that can conceal a few toys they like to keep in the living room. Maybe an ottoman or a pretty basket?

Just wondering do any of you keep some of your kids' toys in your living room? If so, do you have any kind of storage for them?

Let's get organized, organized!

"I wanna get organized, let's get into organized!" Ok so that's what I have stuck in my head right now. Those words sung to Olivia Newton John's song "Let's get physical." I remember really liking that song when I was little and my mom would tell me not to sing it because it really wasn't the best song for a little girl to be singing. Haha. 

I really need some more organization in my life. Desperately. Maybe it's the spring time or the fact that I keep seeing pins on Pinterest about organizing, or I just really really need it in my home. This may sound weird to some of you but sometimes I just wish I was a clean freak. Like one of those people who need everything in place so they pick up constantly. They truly live by the "everything has a place, and everything is in it's place" rule.

Uh yeah I'm not. Neither is my husband. We are not minimalist clean freaks at all. Although I would like to be more like that. 

I'm not saying I want a "perfect" home. 

I know that doesn't exist. Life happens. 

I like homes that are cozy and you are not worried about messing up. But, in our house, sometimes it feels like clutter is taking over. Just too much stuff. Having kids really didn't help our "too much stuff" problem. They have an abundance of clothes and toys. It just doesn't feel as peaceful as I would like it to feel.

So this week (and maybe next week too) I'm focusing on cleaning and organizing. It just feels too hard to fix up and decorate the house when I know I have some spring cleaning to do. I think it would be cool to have a fresh start. 

This week I hope to accomplish these things:

• Tackling the kid's toys - getting rid of some and trying to find a way to organize them
• The kids clothes - organizing them better by size and season
• Tv cabinet - straightening up that huge mess of "stuff" stashed in there
• Armoire in my bedroom 
• Catching up on laundry 

So that is my plan. I'm hoping that things will go good and I get a lot done this week. And to keep me in the cleaning/organizing/spring cleaning mood, here is some eye candy from Pinterest:

Can we say gorgeous?