Why do I want my house to be clean?

For the past month or so I've been posting pictures on Facebook and I even wrote a post about this topic here. I've been struggling with keeping my house clean because there were constantly toys everywhere!!! Well, we went through the playroom and living room thoroughly one weekend and got rid of some more toys that the kids don't play with anymore. We got a 9 cube storage unit for the playroom and moved the little kiddie table from the corner to the middle of the room. That table gets a lot more use now than it ever did in the corner!!

We have a new rule that we clean up before snack time every night before bed. We also clean up before lunch on weekends and the days that I don't work. This has been working very well and I can honestly say that I feel great since we started doing this. With Little E I still have to help him with it a bit, but once I show him that we are putting things into bins, he follows. And Big E fights me sometime with cleaning up but I just tell her that she doesn't get lunch or snack until it is cleaned up and then she starts.

It's so funny how a small change like this can make me feel so good, but it does. Just looking around the house and seeing it all cleaned up makes me happy and feel accomplished. I wish I could say the rest of the house looks as good as the downstairs does, but it doesn't. I'm slowly working on that though. I need to clean off the top of my dresser and clean out my closet sometime soon. I also need to go through both kids' closets and drawers and weed out the clothes that don't fit him!! Little E is in 18 month clothing and I still have 12 month pants in his drawers!! Before you know it he will be wearing size 24 months!!!

In the past I would stress out about not having enough time to clean up and having toys all over the place. But I finally feel like I've found a system that works for us. Sure I still have dishes piling up in the sink every now and then and sometimes the counters aren't the cleanest, but that's ok. Another thing I'm proud of is that I'm teaching my kids at a young age to keep the house clean and pick up after themselves! I remember when I was younger that my bedroom was almost always a mess!! Maybe I wasn't taught at a young age to pick up like I'm doing with my kids, who knows.

Time to clean up!

One room in the house that we struggle with keeping clean is the playroom!! Big E is 3 and a half now so she definitely understands what it means to clean up. Now Little E on the other hand, he still just tries to take toys out as soon as you go to put them away. Occasionally he will put toys away when he sees us put them away, but that's very rare.

So since we had a hard time putting all the toys away in the playroom, I decided to go through them and get rid of the ones that weren't played with. There were a lot of tiny toys that we just didn't need. Here is the before and after of one section of the playroom.

 

The other big area of the room that has a lot of toys in it is the stuffed animals bin. My amazing husband built the kids a little stuffed animal zoo type thing and it is great!!! But the kiddos have way to many stuffed animals. I've tried before to get rid of some but there's just so many that have sentimental value so I can't get rid of them. But I went through them yet again and got rid of a full trash bag of them!

 

It doesn't look like that much of a change, but at least I got rid of some of them. Here is another before and after of the playroom. I am very pleased with how it looks and am definitely going to make sure that Big E and Little E clean up after each time they are done playing in it.

 

Our new living room!

We'v been wanting to upgrade our living room for a while now so this past weekend while the kiddos were at my dad and step-mom's, we finally got the chance to do just that! I don't have any before pictures, but we didn't have much room for toy storage and there was just a small entertainment stand beneath the TV. We used to have the TV on the stand but then we decided to mount it on the wall instead. So we got rid of that stand and now our living room looks like this:

We got 2 sets of 6 cube storage units and my hubby screwed them together to create this. And then we got 12 bins to fill the bottom cubes so we could fill them with toys. The top cubes just hold the bigger Little People toys, plus one of them holds the computer that is hooked up to our TV.

I have always wanted our living room to look like this! It is so much more organized now and it looks a little bigger because the cube system sticks out 7 inches less than the entertainment stand did! I've been to some of my friends houses that have living rooms that look similar to this and I've always wanted mine to look that way as well cause it looked so much neater than what my living room used to look like!

I'm still working on getting the rest of my house looking super organized and clean. I wrote in one of my most recent posts about doing the 10 week organizing challenge that that is going alright so far. That first day I got all of our paperwork out of the filing cabinet and put it in 4 piles. So far we've only gone through 2 piles, but I plan on getting through the last 2 piles within the next few days so I can get the stuff back in the filing cabinet! Stay tuned for the update on that project! I hope everyone is having a great weekend so far!

10 Week Organizing Challenge

I was browsing Pinterest the other night, one of my hobbies, and I came across this, A Ten Week Organizing Challenge for Your Whole House. I know I've written about things like this before where I said I was going to do something every week or month, but this one I'm actually sticking with!!! We just reorganized our living room (post to come soon) and I'm determined to organize every other part of my house!!! So this Pinterest find couldn't have come at a better time!!

So week number 1 is paperwork and command centers. I definitely need to organize this area because I feel like there is paperwork everywhere!!

There are 3 main areas I'm working on this week: the table, the hutch, and (not shown below) the filing cabinet in the master bedroom. At the link above, it shows how to organize paper clutter so I'm definitely reading that and getting some ideas for how to stay more organized with all of our paperwork! 

Today is just going to be a day of planning out what I'm going to do. I will start organizing tomorrow and then post my results when I'm finished!! Happy Monday everyone, have a great day!!

Bathroom makeover!!

Happy Monday everyone! In my post from yesterday, I mentioned that my hubby put in a new vanity and sink in our downstairs bathroom. After, let's see...4 trips I think it was, the sink is finally installed! And I am loving it! It allowed me to free up some space that was in the cabinet above the toilet so it isn't so cluttered in there. And I think it's going to be easier to clean! There was actually something around the drain that both my husband and I didn't think was going to come out. We were both like "Great, it's ruined before we even got to use it." We really thought that it wouldn't come off. My Thieves cleaner didn't even do anything to it! But I was determined to get it off! So I poured some baking soda on it, sprayed a mixture of vinegar and water on it, and let it sit for a minute or so before scrubbing it with a sponge. And guess what, it came off! See what natural cleaners can do? You don't need those harsh chemicals. Actually you can't see what it did because I forgot to take a before and after picture.

But I did take a before and after picture of the bathroom so that you can see what our bathroom looked like before and what it looks like now.

The first time we were at Lowes I asked my hubby "So what are we replacing next?" Our house was built in 2000, so it's only about 17 years old, not too bad. But there are a few things in it that I would like to replace sometime. We already replaced 3 appliances in the kitchen: the dishwasher when we moved in because it took forever to wash our dishes, the oven because we wanted a gas range, and the microwave, we weren't really looking to replace it but my mother-in-law found one at a thrift store that was new and cheap, so she got it for us.

I just love doing makeovers and organizational things so be on the lookout for future posts like this one! My New Year's resolution was to organize my house and keep it cleaner so I've been slowly going through the house to see what can be improved! And trust me, there are tons of things that need to be improved! That's all for now, have a great day!

2017 is coming soon!

Another year is almost over. Which means it's time to start thinking about New Year's Resolutions. One of mine is to get my house cleaner and keep it clean! I can get the house clean when I know that company is coming over, but then after they are gone, it just becomes a mess again. I need to figure out strategies that will work for me in order to keep my house in order. Just recently I was reading the issue of Good Housekeeping with Lauren Graham on the cover. In the article about her, she mentioned a book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. I looked for it at my library and was able to get the ebook version of it. So far I am loving it! On the first page it says, "Have you ever tidied madly, only to find that all too soon your home or workspace is cluttered again?" *Raises hand* Yes!! That is totally me!! It pretty much explains tidying as consisting of two things: deciding whether or not to dispose of something and deciding where to put it. My problem when I clean up and organize my house is that I just worry about where I'm going to put everything. I need to start really looking at things and saying "Do I really need this?" I probably have so many items in my house that I don't need and those items are just taking up space!

So while I'm going to definitely take into consideration what this book has to say about tidying, I'm not exactly going to follow it to a T. It says that you should tidy by category and then go in a certain order. The author says the best sequence is: clothes, books, papers, miscellany items, and momentos. She also says it's a big mistake to tidy by room, but I'm going to ignore that anyway and tidy in my own way. I figure as long as I'm throwing stuff away and putting things that I'm keeping in their proper places, that could work for me.

Throughout the next few weeks I'm going to kick this plan into gear and start getting my house in order! I will be sure to post my progress with before and after pictures!