21-day organizing challenge: Week two recap

21-day challenge: Week two, days 8 through 14

8. dressers/chest of drawers

9. kid spaces

10. Media storage

11. Laundry room

12. Garage

13. Vehicle

14. Purses/diaper bag/ gym bag

Usually, our chests of drawers and dressers stay pretty organized. Of course, they do need a good straightening up every so often. In mine and my husband’s room, we each have a nightstand with two drawers. We also share a six-drawer dresser- he uses three drawers and I use three drawers. 

Here’s where it gets a little unfair: we have a TV cabinet in our room with two drawers on the bottom.  As of right now, (at least until we can add a shelf), the TV cabinet is used only be me. I keep my hosiery, my workout clothes, and my unmentionables here. We need to add some shelving so we can make better use of this cabinet. In the meantime, to organize our clothing storage in our room, I have been using dollar store drawer dividers. This is helping not only to divide the drawer, but to contain some of our smaller items as well. 

I also combined the dressers and kid spaces tasks to re-organized Emorie's dresser. Here is the hot mess we found in her pajama drawer. 

I used some wipes boxes to create drawer dividers. I put her favorite pajamas in the boxes so they'd be easy to find. I also re-folded her pajamas so they'd be easier to stack. I think this looks much better, don't you? 

The next item on the list was kid spaces. We did a general “de-clutter” of her two rooms, as we are in the process of moving her from the nursery into a “big-girl room.”This organizing challenge started right on the heels of Christmas, when we were cleaning out the outgrown toys to make room for all of the new ones. We have had her toys categorized and organized into labeled bins since we moved into the new house. This system has worked really well for her; she knows exactly where to find things and put them away.  I donated and packed away some of her outgrown toys and made new labels for her toys. We also re-organized her bookshelves.

All of our scrapbooks, music CDs and DVDs are stored in the bottom of the TV armoire in our living room. We use mini milk crates to organize our DVDS by category (“chick flicks,” comedies, TV series, kid movies). Our most frequently watched DVDs are our daughter’s. These reside in the top of our TV cabinet next to our DVD cabinet.

Pictures are the hardest thing to organize- we have the majority of our pictures stored on our external hard drive. They are separated into folders by year. For example, all the pictures in the 2014 folder are then separated into more folders by event (example: 2014-àEmorie’s third birthday).

Day 11 should have been about re-organizing the laundry room, but this summer, we are planning to install cabinets and some sort of counter top. I have a nice-sized laundry closet but like most of the closets in my house, they aren’t utilized very well. I think installing four cabinets and a rod will work nicely.

Day 12 was dedicated to organizing our garage. We have plans to get some different buckets to house Emorie’s toys, but for now, we used different left-over bins we took from other areas of the house. I sorted Michael’s tools and Emorie’s outdoor toys much like I did the playroom toys. I sorted everything into various categories and put them in the bins based on what they were (ex. Paint supplies, screwdrivers, sand toys, etc).  I also created new labels for them.

 

Day 13 involved organizing my vehicle.  One of the biggest issues we have with our vehicle is having kid items strewn everywhere and leaving trash in the van. We have this great underfloor storage compartment, where we keep our emergency kit (it contains things like pen/paper, bandaids, a blanket, hand wipes, baby wipes, lint roller, wet bag for wet clothes, tissues, etc), and a small first aid kit. We also put a small container for trash and a basket to hold Emorie’s car toys and coloring books. Hopefully, this will solve both issues.

Day 14 involved organizing my purse. All I really needed to do was clean out my purse, as I had just organized it over the summer. You can read about that here.