Christmas Clean up

To get to your Christmas gear each year quickly and efficiently store it in large Tupperware boxes. The stores have made it easy for you to color code your boxes by offering Red with Green lids at Christmas Orange with Black lids for Halloween and Pink with Green lids at Easter. However, if you are like me I have many boxes at home already so I picked out the matching ones and store all my Christmas items in there. Not only do they stack nicely together because they are all the same size, but next year I just pull out all the same colored boxes and have all my Christmas decorations at hand. If you buy a lot of new decorations to add every year it might be worth going with a very neutral color or clear containers that way you can add to it without messing up your system.
In our garage we have several different colored totes all containing the same type items. Purple has clothes stored for the next season, or growth spurt. Green has Christmas items. Gray has items that I will pass along to my children someday and mementos. For shorter term storage I bought several backs of the filing boxes that you can write on. We sorted out videos, papers, supplies, gift bags, files, and other miscellaneous items to store and dated and labeled all the boxes. Now I not only can get to my "keeps" but because the boxes are all the same style they stack perfectly together.

The man cave

While I didn't make it into my plastic cupboard this week, we did clean out the man cave, otherwise known as the garage. My husband needed to find his tools for assembling the myriads of Christmas gifts and unscrewing the endless battery compartments. We spent a little under a hundred dollars but in the end will save ourselves many hours of looking for the screw drivers, hammers and drill bits.
We went to our local big box hardware store and bought several pieces of 2 1/2 inch by 4 feet boards. After attaching these to the walls my husband added peg board cut to fit just above the boards. We added some pegs and handy screw driver holders and a nice little 20.00 shop light. Now his tools are in easy reach.

Holidays in the Kitchen

What better time to start organizing the kitchen now, when your in it the most. With the holidays fast approaching, baking tends to take up what ever little bit of free time we have. Let's tackle one of the most used cupboards and empty it.

For about $30.00 you can find a metal pan shelf at your local All-in-One store. In my case we found it at Fred Meyer. The install was easy as long as you can find studs. While studs in the wall is necessary too, having a man around to help out here is handy. Once the shelf is up on the wall hanging your pans is simple. Put the pots towards the back and the larger frying pans towards the front. The top can handle any assortment of gadgets and large stock pots. My kids enjoyed playing little tunes on the pans with a wooden spoon so they sometimes get reorganized depending on their mood. However, they still hang nicely and we don't have to worry about the small pans being under all the biggest pans in the very back of the lowest, deepest cupboard when we need them. All the pans are always in easy reach. If your kitchen is small like mine you can use all the space you can find.

Now that you have freed up a large cupboard, we will tackle the plastic in the kitchen next.