Get You Sh*t Together, Carol

\\

Get Your Sh*t Together, Carol

As an adult, I'm finally getting my shit together. Slowly, but surly, I'm getting rid of all of my junk areas (i.e.: junk drawers, closets, and general areas). You've seen the big one, cleaning up the "junk room" 

Junk drawer... done. 

The space above the fridge: 

The space below the sink: 

Even the freezer: 

Pre-made frozen meals in the bin, pizza and beef sticks in the middle, frozen vegetables underneath the shelf, ice cream on top, ice packs on the far right, meat on the inside of the door rotated by the date they were bought (new purchases go on the bottom shelf, old purchases get rotated to the top shelf)

Not to offend anyone, but I am not the type to make cutesy, fancy organization. I just want something functional. 

Here are some tips for functional organization: 

• Keep any sort of container. Old food containers that have lost their lids, empty sandwich bag boxes, etc. I've used all of these for some sort of organization. 
• Buy new bins from the dollar tree. I'm always picking up new bins from the dollar tree. I love the bins I have for my socks, underwear, and bras. 
• Use organizing as a time to purge all your old stuff. 
• Make sure everything is easily accessible and easy to put away. If it's not easy to put back, the likelihood that it will get put back (either by yourself or your husband) is very slim, and that defeats the purpose of organizing. When planning your organization, think if I were to come get this item in a month, would I put this stuff back correctly, or would I just shove it back in there? 
• Bins are not just for holding things, they can be used for so much more. You can see our "liquor cabinet" is actually a bin turned on its side. It looks like a cool, modern, IKEA inspired shelf, but just kidding, it was $3.99 from Goodwill. The nice thing is if we ever to get to the cabinets behind the booze shelf, it's easy to move everything out of the way. 
• Utilize vertical space. Stack things as much as possible. This seems obvious, but sometimes you don't realize how much vertical space you waste. Stack things, add rails, hooks, shelves, anything you can to use as little floor space as possible. 

That's pretty much it. 

Get your shit together, Carol. 

Apartment-Friendly Craft Station

Apartment-Friendly Craft Station

My husband and I currently have a nice 2 bedroom apartment. One of those is our bedroom, or course. The other bedroom is a multipurpose room, including the following purposes: video games, mechanical engineering, arts and crafts, sewing, storage, bedding, laundry, and a guest room. 

Lately, it's looked a little like this: 

It's essentially been turned into a giant junk drawer. Anything we don't want to deal with or need to store somewhere has been thrown in this room. 

I tackled this project over the weekend, and I have to say I'm pretty proud of the results. I needed something that was functional, attractive (or at least not a complete eye-sore), not very permanent (since we hope to be moving into a new house soon!), and takes up a minimal amount of space. 

Here's what I ended up buying: 

• 4 stackable storage crates (as pictured above. It's almost like one of those "I Spy" books)
• (1) 1 x 6 board that was 7 ft long
• 2 L-shaped brackets

Luckily, I already had 4 stackable storage crates, stain, zip ties, and black spray paint.

Here's what I did: 

• I spray painted the pink crates to match the ones I already had
• Once they were dry, I made a two towers of 5 crates. Since the different brands didn't securely stack on top of each other, I just zip tied them together. Not very classy, but you can't see it when it's all finished. 
• Stained the board
• Hung my L-shaped brackets to hold the board right above the two crate towers
• Screwed the brackets to the board

Ta-da! Much better: 

I only had to put in a few nails, since there wasn't going to be anything heavy on my shelf. 

Quite the transformation for a weekend project and $30!