A New Year and a New Home

I am so excited! A new home to make my own.  I always dreamed of having my own home.  My husband and I have been renting for 10 years.  We saved our money and watched the market.  The time was right and after looking at several houses and putting in offer after offer, we finally found our dream home.

For the most part the house was move in ready.  It just needed a little paint and cleaning.  My biggest challenge has been trying to decide where to put all our stuff.  The more I look at the boxes towering over me the more overwhelmed I get.

I want to have an organized and clean home where my husband and I can relax and enjoy the blessings God has given us.  I feel an organized and clean home brings feelings of peace and calm which leads to joy and happiness.

So where to start?

I hope you will follow along as I work through transforming our house into a home.  In the past I have used the techniques learned on the Flylady website.  I have recently found another helpful site called Clean Mama.  If you have a great website you know of that will help me on my journey please leave a comment below.

Thanks for stopping by.  You can also follow me by facebook and pinterest and email too.

Too Many Aprons

I love aprons.  There is something inspiring about all those cute, sophisticated and seasonal aprons I see in the kitchen stores.  They are a fun necessity of the homemakers wardrobe.  Problem is I have so many that they look cluttered and uninspiring.

But what to do?

I don't want to get rid of them.  I use them.

I decide to put the one's out of season in a drawer.

I made room for them by getting rid of all the pot holders I don't use.  I used to collect pot holders like I do aprons but they were never thick enough to keep me from feeling the heat from taking pans out of the oven.

But last Christmas Santa brought me awesome potholders that can withstand heat up to 500 degrees! I now only use these to pick up hot pots and pans.

So its time to get rid of all those I don't use except a few I can use as hot pads to put the hot pans on the counter.

I also separated my wash rags from my dish towels.

And one apron to use between special occasions. 

I am linking this up to A Slob Comes Clean  Weekly Decluttering Party.  Check out Nony's blog to see others decluttering success stories.

I am also linking this up to What-About.Co Show Off Friday Linky Party. 

A New Year A New Start

Ah the proverbial New Year's Resolutions.  Some love them some hate them.  I love them.  I love fresh starts and new beginnings.  I guess it's the optimist in me.  All the Christmas festivities are over and all the family has gone back home.  The house is quiet and I sit here and think next year is going to be different it's going to be better.  I'm going to start earlier,  find gifts throughout the year so I'm not running around at the last minute buying whatever I can find just to have a gift.  I'm afraid to look and see how much I actually spent this year because I did not plan or budget.  Next year is going to be different.  And I'm starting today. I found a website that really breaks down all the planning and tasks into manageable bites throughout the year. The Rudolf Club at Organized Home  I can't wait to get started!

I also found a new blog to follow called A Slob Comes Clean I love how her blog started.  She just wrote from her heart about the struggles of keeping her home clean and organized.  She now has e-books on her discoveries and bought them both!  I've had my blog for almost two years but I don't feel like it has any true direction or purpose.  I'd like to change that.  So I thought I would adopt Dana's style and see how it works for me.

I'd like to use my blog as an accountability tool to get projects started and completed and also to get my home more of a haven of peace and not such a chaotic mess.

Dana wrote two posts a day, one was her checklist and the other her reflections on the day.  I'm going to try that and see if it works for me.  She is also doing a de-clutter challenge this week which I'm going to join. You can find it here  I'd like to start with purging some of my Christmas decorations.  There were quite  few I didn't even put out because I didn't have enough room.

So here's to a fresh start and a new beginning.

Organized Work Space

One of my favorite websites that helps me get my house in order is FlyLady. I found a printable Grand Master To Do List on her site here. I went through my house and made a list of everything I want to get done before Christmas.

I took time to tackle my work space in the kitchen.  FlyLady calls this Control Central.  I keep my laptop, phone directories, post office supplies, bills, and miscellaneous items like coupons, catalogs, and the such.

 

Before

During

 

After

 

A Place for everything and everything in its place!

Getting My House in Order

We leave in a few days for Thanksgiving and when I get back Christmas will be here before I  know it!  My house is such mess I don't know how I'll get it all cleaned and decorated before company comes. I'm so anxious about it I could not sleep and so I got up at 4am to see what advice I could find on the Internet.  Wow! who would of guessed there are so many websites and blogs to help me with my task. Oh but where to start?

The Morning Routine!  every site says start with your morning routine.  I have one so that wasn't difficult to incorporate.  I even wrote a post about it here. 

1. healthy breakfast
2. God's word
3. get dressed
4. make bed
5. check calendar and to do list

Now that I am dressed which job to tackle first?

I decided to make a grand master list of everything I want to do before Christmas.  And at the top of that list is to get my office area cleaned up.

Of course if I don't get off this computer I will never get anything done.  So until tomorrow, I hope you all have a happy organized and productive day!

Menu Planning

Do you have a day that you sit down and plan out your meals for the week?  I do and Monday mornings work best for me.  I've been doing it for over 5 years now and have quite a collections of weekly menus.  At first it was hard.  I didn't even know where to start.  I took some advice from different experts like Martha Stewart and Pam Young and Peggy Jones They taught me to first assign a type of meal for each day of the week. Such as

Monday: Chicken or Pork
Tuesday:Soup
Wednesday: Leftovers
Thursday: Crock pot
Friday: Fish
Saturday: Beans
Sunday: Beef

Then start trying out recipes you think your family would like.  Over the months you will start to have a collection of favorite recipes that you can rotate throughout the year.

After I write out the week's menu I sit down with the recipes and devise a shopping list which also has the breakfast, lunch and snack favorites already listed.

There are also a lot of websites out there that already plan your meals for you with recipes and shopping lists. Just type Menu Planning in the search engine to find them.  Here is one I used to use

http://www.foodonthetable.com/

The biggest benefit to all this is saving time and money.  I'm not wasting time walking through the store every evening trying to figure out what's for dinner then giving up and going for take out.