A Little Facelift and Home Organization

I gave my blog a little facelift today.  It was time for some change!! 

So, I have been working on a whole house reorganization project over the last few months.  I found a great book called "House of Order Handbook- The Best Way to An Organized Life".  It has some great tips in it, that are really helping me to make some changes in our home.

The biggest problem is convincing the kids to help keep things organized.  I am sure it will settle in some time that if they put things away when they are done with them, the house will stay much neater eliminating the constant need to clean up. (which they hate to do of course)

One of the biggest changes I have made in my life and home is with organizing myself and my time.  I made a great spreadsheet calendar for the week.  I have divided my weekly household chores up so that each day I have some work to do.  The nice thing about this is that if I follow my schedule for the week, I never have to spend a whole day cleaning house and when the weekend comes and Mike is home, we don't have to spend that valuable time doing housework.  This has been a huge change for me and for the last 5 weeks I have poretty much followed my schedule.  I simply add in any appontments for the week and print up a new calendar each week and hang it on the magnet board above my desk.

I am sure this will be an never-ending project, but it is fun to see some of it working. 

Last week I cleaned out and organized the kitchen pantry.  It is so wonderful to have it neat and tidy, but I have to tell you what sparked that job.  We have been having a bit of trouble keeping Jacob out of the food.  He is a little sneak and is constantly sneaking into the pantry and cupboards to get snacks.  He is starting to pack on a few extra pounds, and we need to do something to eliminate the in between meal snacking. So we decided to buy an alarm for the pantry door.  In order for this to be successful, I had to make sure all the food was in the pantry, so I had to reorganize, clean up and move extra stuff from the cupboards into the pantry.  The good news is, I think it is working.  I can hear anytime the pantry door is opened (the alarm is annoying too) and I can deter him from getting anything extra to eat.  I hope this works, because the next step is to actually put a lock on the pantry door and I really don't want to have to do that.

Anyway, I guess I better be going.  I'm not sure what the next project will be, probably organizing the food storage in the basement.  Yippee!