Lego Book Storage: a tutorial

I hesitate to call this an actual tutorial since it's basically hot glue and office supplies, but then, sometimes it's the simple things that we need suggestions on. I know it took me way longer than it should to come to this particular solution.
I've already come to the conclusion that the secret to living in a very small space with four people and two pets is the constant rethinking of storage. I've already reorganized several spaces in our apartment to be more efficient or user friendly because they just weren't working. Yesterday I tackled the office closet. We have three closets in our apartment, one for us, one for the kids (currently "the playroom") and one for everything else that needs to be stored. It was starting to look a little Hoarders with stuff piled in there, wedged in here and a big huge computer box from Will's desktop taking up way more space than we could afford. Now all the long term stuff (Christmas ornaments, booster seat, box of miscellaneous paperwork that needs to be kept) is stacked up on the shelf and below there is room for the vacuum, stroller and a few other more readily used items. And while it's nice to have it working better, I can't help but think that in a few months I'll be rearranging it again for some other purpose. I think that's just the way it goes.
The other project I tackled yesterday was Briton's Lego books. He loves to keep the booklets that come with every kit and he does actually rebuild things, so it's nice to have them around. But ugh, they fall apart and slip around and are all over the place. They don't fit well into a bookshelf (and bookshelf space is limited, anyway) and in his Lego bin they always seem to be in the way, which means that every time he plays, they end up all over the floor so he can search for that particular brick that he's looking for.
I was starting to think about tossing them when he wasn't looking when I spotted these cool see through pocket dividers at the art supply store.

A binder, some flat Legos and a little hot glue later and voila, Lego Book Storage. Each divider is a different theme - cars, planes, dragons etc, making it easy to find a particular book. When I handed it off to Briton he declared it "cool!" and then set about building up the bricks to make it more interesting. And it is helping because he's already "discovered" some booklets that he'd forgotten he had. Problem solved. For now at least.
Now I'm on the warpath with our refrigerator. You would think that having one larger fridge would be easier to organize than two undercounter ones but you would be so wrong. Not enough shelves, too easy to loose things in the back. I miss my little refrigerators. Any suggestions for in refrigerator storage?

t-minus two months

I woke up this morning and realized that two months from today, Will will be starting his first day of grad school. Two months. In some ways it seems kind of far off. There is a part of me that's ready to just GO already. But most of me is still in the overwhelmed, too many things to do, holy crap how are we going to pull this off mode. All we Will and I have been finishing projects. Rain delayed the door installation till tomorrow, but we've been caulking seams, painting trim, touching up walls and finishing all those little boring things that need to be done to make the house"finished".
I spent most of one day this week thinning out the shelves and cabinets around the house, packing away things that we don't need but want to keep, loading up bins with things that we don't need and don't want to keep so that they can be hauled to Goodwill. It's amazing how much neater it looks, just because there is less "stuff" around. Will finished the built in in the kids room (at last!) and together we've been sorting, packing, and finishing a huge list of to-dos. And there is more to do. I woke up at three this morning panicked about how many things were on there, sure that we would never get it done, and ended up down on the couch watching Emma until I fell back asleep again sometime around when the sun came up. Of course in the morning my list didn't seem so daunting, and I know that I always get a little in a dither when we move. But really, what I would love to be doing this week is reading the book that I ordered the day before we got the letter and haven't had a chance to pick up yet. Or puttering outside. But I don't think my house has ever been this clean, so I've been taking pictures for postarity, so that when we're in the middle of unpacking I can look back at a clean, pretty house and go to my happy place ;).
Strangely I'm not panicked about New York at all. I've pretty much come to terms with what we'll be doing and am more excited by the day, which is probably why I wish we could just go and not have to deal with all of this selling the house, packing, sorting and cleaning. But really, who would want to do all that? That's the sucky part of moving, right?
So sorry I've been a little MIA this week. I'm really hoping thing will calm down a little over the next few weeks. Monday we're off for a quick trip to our new city to check things out before we really truly sign on the dotted line. Officially and all. So I may be a little absent next week too. But I'll try to pop in from the road! Happy Friday All! (Is it really Friday? Where did the week go?)

sorting, sorting, sorting

Well Monday just flew by without much of a moment for sitting at the computer. Although this move is coming quickly, or at least the decision to move came very quickly, we actually have more time in some ways than we usually have when we've moved. Right now we're filling up every spare second finishing projects around the house, all those things that we planned to get done this year now need to be finished this month. Mudroom walls are being painted, the floor is going in, siding on. The house paint has been touched up. The garden is looking very pretty indeed and the stair banister that we took apart when we installed the shelves are, as I type, being put in. Or at least I think that's what all the banging and drilling coming from the living room is. I'll share photos as we get things completed, if I can remember to take them :)!

But because we do have a little more time before we actually have to move, we are trying to clear out as much as possible. Most of the time we've had to throw things into boxes as quickly as possible and as a result our basement is, well, pretty packed with crap. While I enjoy, most of the time, keeping the "house" tidy, I hate hate hate dealing with the basement. And the car. But that's a totally different story. And a different thing that needs cleaning before it goes.

Will and I joked this weekend that maybe we should permanently become big city apartment people (not really, because I think we'd eventually go a little crazy without a house to take apart) so that we don't have a basement or a car to fill up with junk. Probably not an option though since we like old houses and old houses usually have basements.

Anyway, this is all to say that I spent most of Sunday cleaning out the basement. Not just cleaning but CLEANING! Getting rid of boxes and baskets and random pieces of furniture that we have held onto but don't really need or have much emotional attachment to. I'm still hauling things away but it's a huge improvement. I still have a hard time letting go of things like my old dolls and special furniture pieces like my cradle so those will stay (forever I'm sure) but just having so much gone makes me feel lighter. It's amazing how much junk we have hauled around all these years. And the prospect of needing a smaller storage unit while we are in New York makes me happy too, because student budgets don't leave a lot of room for big storage unit rents, ya know?

If I'm a little MIA for the next week or so you'll just have to know that I'm probably plastering or painting or hauling yet more things to Goodwill. The house will go on the market sometime in early April (so Cville peeps, if you know anyone looking for a charming little Cape with a HUGE yard in North Downtown, send them my way!) but after that I'll be back in full force with projects and plans and all sorts of fun :)

clean closets

I have a sort of split personality when it comes to cleaning. On the one hand, I really like my house to be clean. Or tidy I should say. I don't have germ thing and living in old houses all of my life has meant that having things CLEAN isn't really going to happen. I mean, when your aged wooden floors have gaps between each board, well, dirt is going to happen. But tidy I like. I find it distracting when the house is messy and so I tend to do little sweeps through the house to straighten up before I sit down to work.
Now this isn't to say that my house is always pristine, it's almost never pristine. But usually it's presentable, except on Friday mornings when I'm rushing to meet a deadline. Then, well, it's a crap shoot. It could be clean from the day before, it could be a pit. I dream of super organized spaces with everything stored in matching boxes and neatly stacked into crisp, well lit spaces. I love to look at the rooms on Chez Larsson, but alas, I don't think I'll ever get there. Partly because of the other side of my cleaning personality.

That would be the hoarder.

OK, I'm not a real hoarder, just looking at pictures of hoarders homes gives me the willies. But I do have a habit of stuffing things in closets and the basement when I don't want to be bothered with the "what do I do with that's". So these regular closet cleanouts are necessary for my two halves to work together well.

This closet is my nemesis. It's really the only space in the house other than the basement (which is on the list at the end of the month. Dread dread dread...) that doesn't have a specific daily purpose. No one is getting their clothes out each morning or putting away sheets and blankets. It's just storage. And it's not really clearly any one kind of storage. Originally, when the office was the playroom, it was the guest room equipment storage. Pillows, air bed blankets and shelf space and hooks for luggage made it easy to turn the playroom into a guest room. And we still keep that stuff in there, but now we have overflow books and special toys that are really outgrown but which no one seems particularly interested in moving on from, and playdoh cutters, wreaths, extra crafts supplies. It's a jumble. Since general storage is kind of in shot supply here, it's become the catch all. Which means it can get really, really messy.

When I tackle a closet I try to take EVERYTHING out and start again. That way I'm not married to what one shelf holds anymore. Both this closet and the linen closet got totally rearranged while our clothing closets pretty much went back in the same way that it was before, only cleaner and with less stuff.

I would really love to keep these spaces clean. Sometimes I think making more regular, small clean outs would work, but I'm afraid that if I pack anything else into our cleaning routine it just wont get done at all, and those spaces will become horrible again.

How do you handle these "hot spots" in your home? Do you tackle them on a regular basis and keep them clean or are they once a year, dreaded tasks?

spring chores

Clean closets
Change out winter clothes

These are the first two chores on the list in my planner this week. I know, it seems a little early, but really, it warms up quickly here, we've found, and once it's pleasant out I have a hard time committing to spending several days inside dealing with too warm clothes and too full closets.
It's not my favorite chore of the year but it's probably one of the more rewarding. If I could keep our closets clean all the time it wouldn't be such a big job, but all four of us tend to use closets to stow away things that we don't want to deal with, so twice a year or so I go through everything and "purge" and then I try (unsuccessfully, but still, I try) to keep them tidy and straightened. Usually this works for about two months and then we start stuffing again. Bad habit, but there it is.
Practically this chore means that our house will be a pithole of despair for the next week while the closets (and under the beds too, while I'm at it) get emptied and all the contents get put into piles: GoodWill, Storage, Trash/Recycling, Craigslist and Back in the closet. Then the stored clothes are pulled out and sorted before everything gets put away. It sounds like a big undertaking and it is, but it's not horrible. I usually put a story on my ipod or watch movies on my computer while I work, which makes it almost pleasant. Almost. (This time I'm listening to "My Life on an Allotment" which I suspect will hurry me up because it already has me chomping to get this done and get out into the garden).

The best part of doing this clean out is that it makes room for new things and so one of the things further down on the list this week is to tally up what clothes and shoes need replacing for each person. We're not talking huge shopping sprees here, but even replacing a pair of shoes here and a few shirts there is fun, always nice to have some new togs. :)

Do you do these big clean outs or are you more regimented through the year? I do pretty much a constant rotation of purging but even with that I need these larger, pull out the whole closet events to keep things really organized. Do you hate the chore or kinda like it? How do you handle the switch out of seasonal clothes?

And Now 2011 Can Begin

Oh yeah, the calender is here. Do you ever obsessively check the tracking on a package, even though you know when it will arrive, just to see if maybe, maybe it will come sooner? Well, I do. Not all the time actually, just occasionally I get a little, um, obsessed, with what I've ordered and I CANNOT wait. I remember ordering a copy of a book in college and calling the special orders desk at the school store twice a day (at lease) to see if it had arrived YET? It's almost always books that get me into a tizzy like this.
Now a days I can download a Kindle version for my phone if I'm really that obsessed, unless it's a cookbook. Or a knitting book. Which these days it usually is since I'm not getting a lot of chill out and read time. (I have been making an effort to go to bed earlier to read, but I seem to fall asleep before I've gone a page, which I guess is a sign that I've been living on way too little sleep for the past few years!)
But back to the calender. After a week of checking lulu.com every day (more than once, ahem) for progress and then fedex for three days for shipping updates, it finally arrived and I'm kind of ridiculously in love with it. It's not perfect. The color of the cover isn't quite what it looked like on my screen and even though I went with the smallest hardback size available, it's still a little big. Although it did prompt me to clean out my purse so that it would fit and not get gooed up by things lurking at the bottom (enough change to pay for a full price evening movie ticket was down there too, no wonder I have a sore back!) There is one tiny formatting thing that I would change, but it's not something that is going to make a difference really to how it works. Overall, I'm really, really pleased.

I spent Wednesday evening filling in events on the January calender and on this week's pages. And then yesterday I worked on crossing off this week's chores (clean out under the beds, yuck, haven't gotten to that one yet) Love that I have the menu in there, I almost didn't put that in and I'm so glad I did.

My only concern is that I feel a little bit like my entire brain is all in this one book. If I ever loose it I'll be done for. Even more so than my phone. Although loosing my phone would be pretty bad, mostly because I can not for the life of me remember phone numbers anymore. The number for my childhood house in Idaho is still ingrained in my head but if you asked me to call either of my best friends from a phone other than my own I wouldn't have the foggiest idea. I can barely remember my husbands number. Which is a little sad. I think I used up all of my phone number storing ability in the 1990's when all my friends and I had our own phone lines are spent most of our lives calling each other using the three-way-call function.

In other news. my first column is up over here. You'll see that the whole, calender, chore list idea has been on my mind a lot lately. And there is also a very nice piece about me in one of our local design magazines, ABODE. I'm not sure that I actually said all those things in the sidebar though. It doesn't really sound like me, but maybe I'd had a lot of coffee that day. Or not enough.

One Thing

For the past three new years, I've debated with myself over whether or not to go all digital calender wise. And with each year I get a little closer to ditching the paper calender altogether, but I can't quite commit to it. I love the fact that it dings at me, sends me alerts and otherwise shakes into realizing that I have to be somewhere that day. I like that I can enter something once and have it repeat every 1,2 or 4 weeks, which saves me a lot of work entering things over and over. I like that it's on my phone, which means it's always with me, instead of lying forgotten on my desk. I love all of that. But when it comes down to it, I'm a list girl. And not a digital list girl. I'm a jot things down, sketch them out, physically cross them off the list kind of girl.
About halfway through last year I ditched my paper calender for everything except my chores list and started toting around blank books for all my to-dos, reminders and ideas and left the rest to the digital calender. And it worked, mostly. But after looking through the pages of my various blank books from the year I realized that I've been writing the same basic lists every week. Work to-do, home to-do, the week's menu and a slap dash little calender so that I could look at the whole week at once and know what the plan was. Other than the fact that I spent a chuck of every Monday rewriting all of this, I liked it, but having something ready for me would have been nicer.

So now it's time to make that "what calender" decision again. Ok, that time was a few weeks ago, but I can't find anything that's right for me. Maybe my brain works differently than most people because there is nothing out there for the "just need a little weekly calender and then have lots of room for lists" crowd. I was tempted by an Orla Kiely one because, well, because it was beautiful, but when will pointed out that it was tiny and had no space whatsoever for lists, I decided against. It was pretty though...

For now my notebook is holding up but it's pages are numbered and I have a feeling that it's not going to seem like 2011 until I go though my annual ritual of divvying up annual and monthly chores through the weeks and transferring birthdays and special dates in the hopes that this year I will get it together to send cards.

This is my mission for the week. To get my calender ready, which means I need to get myself a calendar, pronto. And unless something magically appears while I'm downtown this morning, well, I think I might just have to make one, if I can figure out templates on that program that used to be called Pagemaker when I was in college but has a different name now which I can't seem to remember. Oh, InDesign. That's it. I just looked on Will's computer. So, yes, if I can figure that out, then I guess I can just make one that fills all my requirements and have it printed and bound. Part of me wants to try out a DIY leather calender that arrived in my inbox via good old Martha, but for sanity sake and because I'm not sure where I could find some nice leather that wouldn't break the bank, I'm thinking of letting the good folks at Lulu.com do the job.

What do you do? Are you all digital or are you still a paper person? Have you found the perfect calender? Any recommendations before I spend my day in template land?

One Thing
A Monday habit. Share the one thing that you want to do this week, just for you. Tell us what you are working on in the comments and link back to your blog so we can see all the fun things you do!

So, what will you be up to this week?

Puzzle People. Or, Being a Pack Rat Has Benifits

I'm a culler. Meaning that I like to sort through our things on a regular basis and cull out what we don't use and get rid of it. Well I can't really say that I like it. Sometimes I like it, but mostly I like when we aren't overflowing with stuff, so I feel compelled to do it. But it's not my natural state. Really, I'm a pack rat. A recovering pack rat. And the two sides of me really battle it out over craft supplies, or even things that might be craft supplies. It's hard to toss out/recycle/donate that bag of this and that which could, at some point, be useful. I suppose that's what the definition of a pack rat though.
Like a bag of puzzle pieces which has been sitting in my art chest in the mudroom taking up space for about eight months. Every time I open that drawer I wonder if I should just toss them in the recycling. The organizer in me says yes, they are taking up space. The pack rat in me says no, you never know when you might need a few puzzle pieces. So far the pack rat has won out. And you know what? The pack rat was totally right! Yesterday Evie and I colored puzzle pieces and turned them into wreaths and trees and people and I couldn't help thinking "what if I'd thrown these out?" Happy that I hadn't.
Last week I was interviewed for an article on living in a small space. At just over 1100 square feet and with two work at homers, I suppose we are living small, although most of the time our house doesn't feel particularly small to me. I guess part of that is due to finding that balance between culling and saving. The reporter and I talked about the importance of organization and how people don't need as much "stuff" as they have but that you also have to have spaces and times when things can be all over, because with two kids, two pets and two grown-ups who are prone to projects, that's just how it's got to be.

With our playroom gone, we have been doing some experimenting around here, especially as the temperature has gotten colder and the nights have come earlier, with using the spaces we do have in a way that accommodates everyone's projects and activities. It doesn't always go smoothly, and we haven't faced any long periods of "too cold to go outside" days, but I'm far less worried about the prospect of the winter than I was last spring when we decided to make this switch. Maybe that is, in part, because that longer than long, snowier than snowy winter that we had has faded a little from my mind.
Or maybe we are just starting to figure it all out. The office is a family space. The coffee table is the spot for puzzles and checkers and playdoh and doodling. The hallway is the perfect place for a train to rumble along. It's still a balancing act. Keep, toss, pull out, put away, you work here, I'll work there, they'll play over there. But I'm finding that I am much happier to have this balancing act than the ones we might be having if we lived different lives.

Do you live small? Does it even feel small to you? Or do you need space to stretch and sprawl and run? Although I definitely have some strong feelings about living small, or smaller, I know there are people who wouldn't dream of it. If you are living small, how do you handle that balance between what to keep and what to toss and where to put and do all the things that happen in a house?

Office Storage

When we made the big playroom to office switchover, we spent a lot of time thinking about how our work spaces would work, and not a lot of time planning out our storage. Why would we? There is a huge wall mounted shelf on one side of the room, plenty of space for all my craft supplies and Will's books, right?


I'd been reading a lot of Chez Larsson back then (still do) and I loved her white on white style so I bought a ton of white storage boxes from Ikea and loaded them up. It was nice to have everything in it's own box. Much easier to find, say, that spool of stretch magic thread or the packet of seed beads when there is a box for everything. But the white on white just didn't work. Partly because there was a lot of not white stuff up there. Lots of architectural book, lots of my antique kids books leftover from the playroom days. It's bugged me every day since.


Earlier this week I was doing some more work avoidance and sat in the office just staring at the wall o shelves. Yes, just staring. I'm sure a couple of neighbors walked by and saw me at it through the window. But between the half ripped off/painted house and the regular sounds of hammers at night, I think they just know I'm crazy by now. But while staring at the wall I decided what I needed was contrast on the back of the shelves. Not the whole shelves, just enough so that the white boxes popped instead of just looking blah. I didn't want to paint because it took A LOT of coats of white to cover the original nasty wood of the shelves in the first place and what if we hated it? So it had to be paper or fabric.




Yesterday I emptied the shelves one by one, culled, sorted and stored, moving the kids books to the living room and some of the uglier crafty things to the closet, and used spray glue to mount some dark gray felt to the back of each shelf.






The wood on the back is slatted and uneven so it was hard to get everything perfectly straight, but the overall effect is just what I wanted. Now that the boxes and books are in their new spots (some of the hard to reach stuff I used a lot while the little used things were easily accessible) I'm liking it a whole lot more. It feels clean and organized which is weird because before it was clean and organized(ish), but just not very stylish. At least I hope it's stylish now. What do we think? Better?

Felix vs. Oscar

Back when we started this whole working-at-home thing, I remember thinking that our desks would be like the Odd Couple had moved in. I'm Felix, if you hadn't guessed, and Will would be the Oscar. And I fully expected that to be the case. I like tidy. I like organized, at least to a point. And I have a hard time working when the house is cluttered. So it stands to reason that I'd want to keep my desk clean. I always have before.

But this morning I sat down at my desk and started working only to look around and notice, "Holy crap! It's me! I'm the Oscar!!"
But then I looked over and, no, Will is still the Oscar, or he's also the Oscar. Because, well, yeah. At least my mess is colorful :)
I wont even show you what's on the drafting table behind me. It looks like a trace paper storm collided with a cardboard box tornado and then a tweed coat flew into the mix. Although to be fair, most of the cardboard is from a bunch of packages that we rescued off of our neighbors stoop yesterday during the storm.

But I have to admit that this is often how my desk looks when I shut down for the day. Half finished swing projects waiting to be pinned. My next articles craft in pieces waiting for photographs, notebook and calender open, coffee and breakfast (or lunch, depending) next to the computer.

Part of it is that I'm not really happy with our storage set up. We have plenty of shelves in here, but only one is very tall, and it's taken up with larger items. My writing space is also my crafting space and it's not really quite big enough to accommodate both at the same time.

Surprisingly though, at least to me, I'm not really bothered by it. Sometimes I look around and feel a little claustrophobic with all this stuff pressing in around me. Most of the time, however, I'm OK with the mess. Not that I wouldn't love for it to be magically pristine, but for now, I'm good. I still have a hard time working when the sink is full of dirty dishes. But hey, one step at a time, right?

Listmonger, Listmaker, List-a-holic

That would be me. Confession time... I am an obsessive listmaker. I have lists of lists. Seriously. Ask Will. When we are getting going on something the first thing I want to do is make a list of what we need, when we are doing what, what each of us will be doing to get it done... I can't help myself. And funny as it is, it does help me. I have a terrible memory. If it's not written down I will forget it the moment I walk out the door. Or in the door. Or which ever way it is I'm heading.

One of the lists I've been working on lately is a master chore list. Not just things like "do the dishes" or "fold the laundry" (although yes, they are on there) but a real list of all the things that need doing during the year. Because like I said, if it's not written down, I won't get it done. As a result I forget when it was I've last washed the duvets, we forgot to clean the gutters entirely this fall and I will put off cleaning the basement until, well, until a massive rain hits and we wake up to find the whole thing ankle deep in water. I used to do the Flylady thing and while it was OK, it was a little too much. I can remember to clean my house every week. I'm actually kind of obsessive about things being tidy. I have this ever present conviction that at any moment someone might stop by and so the house should be guest ready at all times. Or at least close. But things like turning the mattress or winterizing the car, well, those things dont get done unless it's somewhere on one of my lists. And so now it is.

I spent Saturday afternoon brainstorming things that should be done once a year, twice a year, four times a year, every month, every two weeks and every week and then I split them up into my paper calender, making a little list for every week. (I just can't quite make that jump to all digital, I tried last year but as we now know, still forgot to clean the gutters, so back to paper I went) I know, obsessive. But it works for me.

Will requested a list of daily and weekly chores that he should be doing because, like me, if it's not there in front of him, it wont get done. So I also made a calender to hang on our heater vent/message center. That, actually, was kind of fun. I browsed through the print your own PDF calendars on Etsy but couldn't find exactly what I was looking for. Plus I wanted to add the list so I poked around with clip art and made these in Word. I'm sure something much better could be done in Pagemaker or Photoshop but since I dont have either on my computer (and I'm not very good at using them anyway) I went the simple route. So now we have all the school activities and all the major household annual chores and a list for Will all on one calender that actually fits in the space (it's too narrow for a regular calender anyway and yes that is a list of meals..) and I have my OCD list in my little pocket calendar. So here's to an organized year. I hope.