More organizing

This may not look like a big deal, but the photo below represents hours of hard work, cleaning and organizing our closet full of tools and cleaning supplies.  This half-closet (below the heating unit) is our only place to keep tool boxes, power tools, glue, duct tape, brooms, a ladder, and a variety of cleaning products.  

After living in our condo for 5 years now, we'd accumulated quite a few specialty items that were tossed into a couple of large bins, completely disorganized.  (There were 2 kinds of silver cleaner, and 3 bottles of WD-40!)  There's something about a messy closet or corner that makes my blood pressure rise whenever I see it, or actually, when I have to find something that has descended into its depths.  So we bought a shelf, took everything out, sorted, cleaned, and put it all back.  And there's all sorts of extra room now, and hopefully we won't fill it up too quickly!

Gettin' crafty

This week we are taking a "staycation" and on Monday, I was able to do some things I've been wanting to do for a long time...mostly shopping and errands totally by myself!  It's amazing how much I can do without a baby in tow.  (I went to 8 stores in 3 shopping centers in a couple hours...completely amazing compared to most outings these days.)  

Another thing I did on Monday was start and finish two different projects I'd been wanting to do for a while.  The first, which I haven't photographed, is an oversized hooded towel for Elijah.  His baby hooded towels are too small, and a bath towel doesn't cover his head (though I suppose I could have gone and bought a giant bath sheet).  So I found a 6-piece towel set on clearance at Bed Bath & Beyond for under $10, and then sewed a hood (made from a hand towel) onto the main towel.  I think it'll work well.  It's pretty boring...plain, solid color...but the only place I've seen these for sale is the Pottery Barn Kids catalog, and I am NOT paying $25 for one towel.  

My other project was to make some new baby bibs.  Someone gave us a homemade one that was better than all of the store-bought ones we have (covers more area, very soft, adjustable size), so I bought some fabric, traced a pattern, and made 4 of them for myself, for about $6.  If I would have been content with whatever fabric was available in the bargain bin, it would have been dirt cheap, but I was going for both cute and functional.  Here it is (funny expression on E's face!):

Not quite what I planned...

I've been on a home organization/rearranging kick for a while now, and today I decided to remove the coffee table from the living room.  It's rather sad, actually...it's a really cool table that I made myself out of an old door and some IKEA table legs.  I love that thing...but it was getting really unstable, and had sharp corners just waiting to injure Elijah whenever he starts moving around.  So we dismantled it, and it cannot be easily put back together again.  Someday, I will rebuild it, but for now we are going to store the pieces.  

I thought I found the perfect deal on a storage ottoman today (cheap to begin with, $20 off on sale and another $9 off because I found a minor defect), but when I got it home, it was way too small for the space.

So I have no coffee table, and no ottoman.  I really can't afford to spend the money on a "real" ottoman from a real furniture store.  So now I'm getting used to having nothing in this space.  It's not a terrible thing to have more open floor space.  Just not what I planned.  Oh, well!  

I am pretty proud of myself.  I decided a while ago that in order to get and keep my house organized, I was going to pick a spot, any spot, each week to completely clean and organize.  Usually, it's a very tiny area like one bathroom drawer, one closet shelf, etc.  And so far I'm doing one each week, or more than one.  I take everything out, decide if there's anything I don't need (hello, expired medicine!), anything that should be stored elsewhere (goodbye, maternity clothes!), clean thoroughly, and put it all back in an organized fashion.

Now I'm selling some things I found on eBay, doing lots of recycling and packing up for thrift stores.  It's not an overwhelming thing to clean out one little area each week.  I highly recommend it.

All of this stuff was $20!

Major score on Craigslist today.  I had to drive all the way into downtown Chicago, but it was so worth it.  I got 58 articles of baby boy clothing in E's current size, and next 2 sizes, for $20.  This, plus a few things that I just bought using a $100 Old Navy/Gap gift card (from our credit card reward points!), took us from nothing to fully stocked for the summer, and probably the fall & winter, too!  Amazing.  

Another really amazing deal was a whole freezer full of Omaha Steaks.  The combination of a really good sale price plus more credit card reward points means that we have more than 60 servings of meat in our freezer for $40!  And it's good stuff, too.  I missed Will's grilling over the winter.  :)  

The weekend

This has been a very full weekend---and a very good one.  I can't really even remember everything that we did, but Saturday was pretty low-key.  We did a few cleaning tasks around the house, but for the most part just enjoyed a day off.  Then we had a wonderful dinner with good friends.  And to top it all off, Elijah was very pleasant--happy and smiley--all day.   

Today there was church, then I spent all afternoon running errands (more on that later), and then the church Planting Team meeting, which was really powerful and motivating.  I had a nice long chat with each of my brothers (happy birthday, B!). 

Perhaps the weirdest thing that happened all weekend was my accidental encounter with a major event in Skokie.  At first I had no idea what was going on, just figured something big was going on because there were remote parking signs everywhere, parking shuttles, and major roads were closed.  And THEN after navigating through a detour, I saw a small group of protesters holding Nazi and other flags.  OHHHHH....it clicked, finally.  The new Holocaust Museum in Skokie.  There were police everywhere.  I was just watching the news and discovered the other reason that everything was barricaded, detoured, etc.  Bill Clinton, Elie Wiesel, and others were there for the grand opening.  Hopefully I can get over to see the museum sometime.  Anyway, I don't have anything charitable to say about the people who were protesting, so I'll leave it at that.

Elijah has been handling the schedule interruptions very well; overall, he's a very happy little guy.  Sundays are always a little hard to figure out, when we have to squeeze in a couple of partial naps.  But he's not nearly as upset by this as he usually is.  And I suppose having a pretty consistent routine on the other 6 days a week helps a lot.  

All in all, a very interesting day.  And a very good weekend!  

Recent video...

I already posted this on Facebook...thought I'd add it here, too.

I'm a sucker for cute baby photos of all sorts, including this one of
a rare leopard cub. Awwwwww....

Yummy ducky!

Mmmmm....wood toys.

Smiles & Giggles!