Organising – Nightwolf's Den

20 Days: Days 6-10

I actually managed to keep up this time so here are days 6-10

Day 6 was the bathroom. Love that our bathroom is fairly small so stays pretty tidy so it was just a quick once over.

Before

and after

Day 7 and we cleaned out the fridge. And I managed to declutter my cookbooks. I’ve scanned the recipes I use often and the ones I want to try so now I can get rid of some cookbooks.

Before and after

Day 8 was cleaning the sunroom which is Miss K’s playroom. This room is such a pigsty with paper everywhere & stuff gets dumped there before getting taken to the office.

Before and after

Day 9 was cleaning out the junk drawer and organising my calendar & diary

and after

and finally day 10 was cleaning the oven. I hate cleaning the oven with a passion but I have actually been keeping up with cleaning it so it was a pretty easy job this time round.

20 Days – Days 1 to 5

It took a little longer than I thought to get the first five days done. Life (& bushfires) happened.

Day 1 was focusing on the kitchen. This is what I had to contend with….

Hubby was out helping his sister defend their place from a bush fire so I gave Miss K some play dough, some paint with water and chucked on ABC 4 Kids and she was happy to play while I got stuck into the kitchen. I was sooo tempted to pull everything from the cupboards and sort them but I managed to restrain myself lol.

Here’s my task list for the day and here’s my clean kitchen

Day 2 – the master bedroom, or as it’s commonly known in our house – the dumping room.

I struggled with this room. Not so much getting all the clothes put away but all the scrapbook stuff that makes it’s home in our bedroom. I’m still slowly sorting it out and working out what I want to keep here (Project Life, wedding album, Journal Your Christmas) and what will go to the scrap room at Mum & Dad’s. So not 100% clean but much better than it was before.

On to day 3 and we’re in the laundry

Our laundry is usually pretty good so it was just a quick clean and tidy. Gave the washing machine a good clean as well.

Our lounge room frequently looks like a bomb site & day 4 this was my focus

I have to admit, did a little more than was on the list cause I was getting sick of all the mess. Swear our lounge room will never be clean til someone grows up & doesn’t drag all her toys out here.

Finally a nice easy day focusing on the floors & the pantry. No floor photos but here’s the pantry.

I did go a little overboard in the pantry and decided to recover the shelves. OMG remind me never to do that idea again. I’d love to have the money to pull out all the shelves and replace it with something from Howards Storage World or IKEA.

If you’re doing the challenge, how’re you faring? And for the record, here’s my kitchen bench after 5 days (which is actually 15 days total *sigh* – hopefully the next five days will be a bit better)

20 days to Organise and Clean your home Challenge – Take 2

It’s that time of the year again. Christmas and New Year are over and it’s time to get the house back in order and a lot more organised. I really want to get our house more organised and clean in 2013. Creating a warm, inviting sanctuary if you will.

I took part in The Organised Housewife 20 Days to organise and clean your home the first time it ran and I loved it. The house stayed pretty clean and organised… until just before Christmas. And of course we hosted Christmas lunch so that added to the mess.

I’ll just be blogging my journey this time, not sharing on Instagram cause I ended up forgetting half the time lol

One of the pre challenge tasks was to set some goals. Here are mine:

I want to feel RELAXED & COMFORTABLE while I’m at home.
I want to spend more time PLAYING WITH MISS K INSTEAD OF CLEANING.
I want an area of the home where I can DO SCRAPBOOKING.
I want to organise MY WHOLE HOUSE.
I always lose KEYS & WALLET.
Something that I don’t need anymore , but am having trouble parting with KITCHEN STUFF I NO LONGER USE.

So roll on the next 20 days….

Planning for 2013

Can you believe we’re nearly at the end of 2012? The year has just flown by!

I’m hoping to make 2013 more organised for our family and for me in general.

Starting out with my Inner B organiser. This is my second year using this diary and I’ve got to admit I love it. In 2013 I’m taking a bit of a cue from the lovely Tina and using some of her ideas in my organiser.

I’ve added a section for my 2013 Goddess Workbook, my blog and a section for Christmas. I even got a bit creative in Photoshop & made my own dividers. I’ve also culled some of the pages I probably won’t use in my diary but have added them to my home notebook (that’s a whole other post in itself).

Before the year starts I like to go through and add birthdays, anniversaries, Hawks events in Tassie and any other events I already know the dates of.

I love how the Inner B diary pages have four sections under the daily page and birthdays. I’ve assigned these for work, bloggy stuff I don’t want to forget (like sponsored posts, giveaway ending dates and the like), our menu plan for the week and Fat Mum Slim’s photo-a-day prompts (I’m hoping to do all 365 prompts in 2013)

First is one of my favourite sections – Leonie Dawson’s Goddess Workbook. I could seriously give this section it’s own post! If you are interested in reading a bit more about the workbook you can check out my post about the 2012 workbook. I’m on my third workbook now but this is the first year I’ve printed it out and added it to my organiser. I’m hoping that works for me better.

Each year you are given prompts to help ‘close’ the previous year before planning the year ahead. For 2013 I’ve actually managed to write a list of 100 things I’d like to do during the year (I’ll be sharing that list in early 2013). And there’s still many pages to fill in and my oracle reading for 2013. I’ll be doing this on New Year’s Eve – a good way to close the year of 2012

Then we get into the section dedicated to my blog. (If you notice in the above photos it’s not in there yet. I stuffed up when I printed it so have to reprint it all) I used Organised Housewife Blog Planner for 2012. For 2013 I’ve printed a selection of pages I know I’ll use from the planner and left out things I know I won’t use (like the conference section cause there’s no conferences in sight for me in 2013 *sad face* but that is cool cause it means I can do awesome stuff closer to home). I’m going to try out the Confessions of a home schooler blog planner in 2013 to plan my blog post, giveaways and the like. She has a 2 free printables to choose from: a calendar style layout and a lined format post planner (I’ve gone with the lined format)

I seriously have some big plans for my little blog in 2013 but you’ll have to wait til the new year to find out *wink* one I can announce is I will be starting an email newsletter. Not 100% on what it will include but I’ll let you know when it goes live 🙂

Finally I have a section just for Christmas. In 2012 I used the Organised Housewife Christmas Planner. Helped make everything much more organised & I plan to use it again for 2013. I’ve even started my gift idea list for 2013!!

So that’s my start to getting organised in 2013. Have you started your planning for 2013?

Christmas 2012–Getting organised

Up until recently I was so unorganised around Christmas time. I’d leave things til the last minute and would panic buy on the pay before Christmas. I’ve even been known to be doing shopping on Christmas Eve! Then, about 3 years ago I decided enough was enough and did some searching on the internet to become a bit more organised over the holiday period.

One of the first sites I came across was Organized Christmas. I already used the Organized Scrapbooks site for their printables so decided to check out the site. They, at the time, had two choices for holiday organisation – Christmas Countdown and the Holiday Grand Plan. I went with the Christmas Countdown. It’s a 6 week workshop starting in October and finishing on the 1st December, designed so you’re organised and can relax and enjoy the holiday season come December. Each week is assigned a theme – get organised, reality check, gifts & giving, get cooking, decorating and celebrating. And there’s the printables to help you stay organised and less stressed.

The first year I followed along a bit half heartedly but the following year I followed every step and was ready for Christmas (minus a few small gifts) by the end of November. A huge bonus as I was a new mum. Last year I followed along again, a lot more loosely, picking and choosing what worked for our family.

This year I’ve decided to check out some other systems to see if I can find something that is really me.

I’d seen The Organised Housewife’s Christmas Planner last year about half way through doing the Christmas Countdown. I bought it last week and have printed it out and added it to my Inner B organiser (thanks to Tina for the awesome idea of adding extra sections to my organiser).

I’m loving supporting an Australian mum and I love how this planner isn’t centered around American holidays (sorry to all my US readers but I really don’t need to know about celebrating Thanksgiving lol)

There are lots of great checklists and planners and the graphics are too cute. It’s actually making the planning process more fun. A couple of planners that aren’t relevant for me this year but may be useful later.

If you want to know how to put your Christmas Planner together you can always check out this post. And you can buy your own copy of The Organised Housewife’s Christmas Planner here for $14.95 (Australian dollars)

The boring bit – I’m doing a series on Christmas (again) this year. You can follow all my posts here

20 Days–week 3

I’ll be honest. I slacked off a fair bit this week. And OMG you can tell! I spent Friday and Saturday catching up with this week’s challenges. There’s also a lack of pics cause I was too busy cleaning 😉

Day 11’s challenge was to clean our washing machine and organise our linen cupboard.
We now have a clean washing machine again.
The linen cupboard wasn’t too bad as I’d gone through our sheets & towels not too long ago, it just needed a tidy up.

Day 12 was the dishwasher’s turn to get clean. I love this way of cleaning my dishwasher now, no more chemical cleaners. Miss K got in on the action too.

I also decluttered and organised our bathroom cupboards

Before

and after

Day 13 was cornice cleaning and sorting artwork. Miss K has recently gotten into drawing and painting so I’m getting this system in place now.

Day 14 was the office. Since I’m being honest, I’ll let you know I skipped this room. It is currently the dumping ground while our garage is being cleaned (our office is off the garage). I’ve filed all the notes away for when we get stuck into it (which will hopefully be soon)

Day 15 was cleaning outdoor areas. I cleaned the area around our front door, did a bit of weeding and planted some potted colour.

Onto Week 3…..

20 days–week 2

And here we are at the end of week 2. I am feeling so much more organised and the house is actually managing to stay clean!
We’re still nutting out our morning and evening routine but we’re slowly finding what work and what doesn’t.

Day 6 was the bathroom. Now I hate my bathroom, with a serious passion. I don’t mind that it’s small and I do like the fact the toilet is a separate room, it’s the fact that it’s wood panelled – the whole room! It’s vile. It’s starting to rot around the bath. Yuck. and probably a health hazard too. Can you guess which room we’re renovating next.

Before

After

Day 7 I cleaned and reorganised our fridge.

I’m surprised at how much stuff was out of date. I loved the idea of pre-cutting all our veg (you’ll have to scroll down the page a bit) so I’m going to invest in some new containers so we can do that here.

Day 8 was the spare room so I cleaned our sunroom. It houses our drier (until we finish doing up the laundry) and some of Miss K’s toys and her little table and chairs. I also decluttered all of Miss K’s toys. Some are being stored and others we’ll be giving away.

Day 9 – cleaning fans. Easy – don’t have any. We had the reverse cycle put in today so checking the filters will be a new monthly job. I decluttered our junk drawer into a box. I sat down Saturday and sorted it, threw away and put things in better places. Junk drawer organised.

Also organised my dairy for the rest of 2012. I’ve added all the birthdays, public holidays and events I know about now.

Day 10 was cleaning the oven, not one of my favourite jobs. Thanks to this challenge I’ve now found a super easy way to clean my oven. Love it!

Looking forward to starting week 3. I can’t believe we’re half way through.

20 days to organise?

Can it be done? The Organised Housewife thinks so and during September is challenging us to follow along with the daily prompts and challenges to make our lives more organised. I’ve been reading The Organised Housewife blog for some time now and thought, Why not? And on the upside the site is Australian Winking smile

Anywho, 20 days started on Monday…. well actually it started last week with 5 pre-challenge tasks.

We created a folder to keep all our notes, printables and checklists in one place, created a cleaning kit, created a morning & evening routine and set some goals. All ready to go we started Monday in the kitchen. I have to admit, the kitchen is one area I really struggle to keep clean.
My before and after

So loving having a clean kitchen AND for the first time in ages I’m actually making an effort to keep it clean. Trying to convince hubby to help keep it clean is another matter though.

I missed doing day 2 & 3 cause I wasn’t home so day 4 was three days rolled into one.
We did the Bedroom on day 2
Before & after

The bedroom still isn’t 100% clean. My scrap stuff I’m keeping here is still unorganised but I do have a plan for that.

Day 3 – laundry
Before & after

Another room that still needs work. As soon as the plumber comes and fixes the plumbing we can add the laminex behind everything, put in the new sink, add some new shelving and give it the walls a coat of paint.

Day 4 – Lounge room
Before and After

Day 5 was cleaning floors. We vacuumed and mopped so the floors now look reasonable again. No photos cause I couldn’t b bothered LOL

Another upside to this challenge – I’m more motivated to start my household folder (control journal or whatever you call it). I’ve started a list of all the projects I want to get done room by room. Inspiration from Pinterest. Routines. Important numbers. That sort of thing.

Weekend update – The kitchen is still clean! This is it Sunday evening. We’d had guests for tea but the kitchen is still reasonable not like it would have been before – stuff everywhere

The bedroom seems to be less of a dumping ground AND I’m folding washing and putting it away when it’s dry (instead of dumping it on the bed, then back into the basket or just leaving it in the basket). Laundry is still clean. Lounge room looks like we have a toddler as Miss K loves leaving her toys everywhere but much more manageable now.

Bring on Week 2. I’m loving having a cleaner house and actually managing to keep it slightly more clean and organised.

It’s not too late to join in the 20 day challenge, you can still subscribe