Area #20: Craft Area

My craft area has been a disaster since the day we moved in.  I had boxes and totes full of craft supplies with no where to put them.  A couple months ago we got another shelf for our basement, so I was able to swap one we already had to start storing craft supplies.  So, my craft area was on it's way, but still needed a lot of help.  Here's my area before:

Because we are anti-microwave people, we keep our microwave in the basement.  That might not make much sense, but we only use it to soften butter and thaw out meat if I forget to plan ahead.  This happens maybe once a week so instead of cluttering up counter space, we keep it in the basement.  It used to sit on the floor which made it even more difficult to use.  Just last weekend I was at a thrift sale and found this perfect little table for only $2.  I had seen actual microwave carts at a sale too and they wanted $5 for a particle board stand.  This one is solid wood! It fits perfectly in the spot and is perfectly functional too. 

After some organizing and swapping of containers, my craft area now looks like this:

I'm still in the process of finding the right organizational tools for this area.  I know I need several different things, but I'm just waiting to find them (hopefully at thrift sales this summer).  I love how God provides for the needs of our family through thrift sales.  As I was taking these pictures, I was thinking about how I need to get another tote to store fabric in because the one I have the lid can barely shut.  The very next day I went to an Estate Sale and found an orange tote for $2 that will work perfectly.  It made me think of this verse:

Philippians 4:19 (KJV)

 "But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus."

Area #19: Family Room

The other side of the room from the toy area is our family room.  We don't use it a lot mainly because it's colder down there than the rest of the house.  It's where our tv is, so we use it for watching movies and I'm sure we'll be down there a lot more during the hot days of summer.  When we first moved in, I set up all of our books on the huge built in book shelves.  The main counter area has been a collecting spot for lots of things that I finally cleared out and gave a home. 

When it came to organizing my shelves, I thought of many ideas I have seen over the years.

The horizontal stacks:

 The rainbow:

The style I liked the best was like this:

A combination of vertical and horizontal stacks with misc. art, pictures, objects filling in the spaces.  At our old house I had all of the books arranged by author's last name with fiction and non-fiction separated.  Here I decided to spread things out and arrange them by subject.  Marriage, children, Bible reading aids, evangelism, gardening, and others are how I divided the books.  I also kept the shelf right above the tv open for our movies.  That shelf is also 'home' for the remote so that we don't waste time looking for it when we need it. 

Here are our shelves, and yes, Evelyn was watching Veggietales while I was doing my organizing...

I want to find more decorative things to put on the shelves as either bookends or to fill up the empty spaces.  That's one of the things on my thrift sale list. 

Area #18: Crawl Space

I had this brilliant idea to use our crawl space as an indoor play space over the winter.  The ceiling is just the right height for Evelyn sized kids to run around and play in there.  I brought in all of her outside toys and balls and set up the area for play.  I think we used it maybe a handful of times, but the kids loved it each time.  Now that it's warmer out, I've moved all of the outside toys back outside.  The crawl space is now holding the baby swing waiting to go to my sis-in-law, and Elsie's big red sled.

Our house has more storage than we can fill up right now, so this area is staying relatively open which is fine with me.  I love having areas of the house that are uncluttered.  It will also be nice come next winter when I can put the outside toys back down here and I won't have much stuff to move out.

Area #17: Closet Under the Stairs

I use the closet under our stairs in the basement for box storage.  Kevin's brother's family recently moved and I was able to give them almost all of our larger boxes.  I always debate between which boxes to keep and which to throw out.  You just never know when a certain sized box will come in handy for mailing something, or a gift, or transporting things, or when you need cardboard for a project etc.  I'm sure I still have many more boxes than we need even after sorting through them and getting rid of a bunch.  Here's a shot of my box stash.

The awesome blue and white papered box is huge and perfect for holding and containing miscellaneous smaller boxes. 

Area #16: Basement Toy Area

The toy area in the basement used to be an eye sore for me.  Now it makes me smile every time I go through the room.  A while back I moved almost all of our toys into the basement.  It's been nice because I don't have to worry about keeping them cleaned up because if someone stops in they won't see them, and it's not something that I'm stepping over or even seeing every day.  My basement toy area used to look like this:

Elsie hasn't played with the play mat or sat in the swing or the exersaucer (not pictured) for months, yet they have been sitting down here cluttering up the room.   Both the play mat and the exersaucer were borrowed from others, so I just cleaned them up and got them ready to return to their owners.  The swing is now being stored away waiting for my next little niece or nephew to arrive so they can borrow it.  I've discovered that it is a wonderful thing to borrow large baby items.  You use them for such a short time that it doesn't pay to buy them.  And then when the kids are done using it, you just give it back.  It's wonderful.

After getting rid of the unused baby items, adding nails to hang cowboy items, and getting a box to keep the baby doll items, my toy area now looks like this:

You might think it just looks like I picked up the room.  While I did do that, the simple other things that I did are helping to keep this room clean.  I moved the puzzles where Elsie can't reach them so that she doesn't dump them on the floor every time we're down there.  The doll box was huge because those items haven't had a spot yet and always ended up scattered.  Now it's so simple to toss them all in the box and it's something that Evelyn can do.  I have really noticed my toy area 'cleaning itself' and I love walking through the room now and seeing everything still looking neat.

Girls Dress Project

My sister-in-law and I have been talking about making dresses for our girls since last summer.  We even went as far as going to the fabric store to look at fabric, but we didn't find anything that we liked well enough to pay $5 a yard for.  About a month ago we were cleaning out a closet at her house and found some old bed sheets that were hardly worn and had a pretty flower pattern on them.  We decided that they would be perfect for making the dresses we'd been talking about.

So, on Wednesday of last week we got together and cut out the pieces for the dresses.  This took way longer than I was expecting because every dress piece had to be cut out twice for each dress (one for the dress and one for the dress lining) and then there were three dresses.  It took us almost a full afternoon just to cut out the pattern.

We had decided between ourselves that there was no way we could get them done before Easter since it was only 4 days away and we both had other things going on too.  I decided to work on Evelyn's dress on Thursday just to see how long it would take to do.  Well, I got it almost all done except for the zipper and hem and a little hand sewing as well as a good portion started on Elsie's dress.  This gave me hope that I could possibly get the dresses done by Sunday.

Basically 2 1/2 days of straight sewing and I had all three of them done.  My fingers were achy and my back sore from bending over the sewing machine, and I was generally lacking in the sleep department, but it was so worth it!  Here are the results:

Evelyn

Elsie

Karissa

Happy Easter everyone!

Area #3: Entry Room

I'll just put the before pictures up first so you can see what I was up against.  This was supposed to be the third area I completed, and it has taken quite some time to finish up.

Our entry room has always been a constant battle for me to keep clean.  When I originally analyzed our house I realized that even though we have a coat closet right on the other side of the wall, we don't use it.  When we come in, we take off our shoes and drop our coats on the floor.  I brought this to Kevin's attention, and he decided to make some coat hooks to put in the room so that we can just hang our coats right where we take our shoes off instead of dropping them on the floor.  The wall transformed from this:

To this:

One big thing that she stressed in her book was to have a 'going out' system.  I've been really bad at this until now.  I would stack some things on the counter, some things on the floor in this room, some things in the car, somethings in the garage.  And then when we were going to the place I needed to bring the stuff, I forgot it.  I decided to turn the built in bookshelf into my out going station.  It doesn't really matter if it looks a little messy because nothing really stays there for long.  Plus when you first come into the house from the garage or the front door, you don't see this wall at all so the visual appearance is neat.  Now when I need to get something back to someone, I can just scan the shelves as I'm putting my shoes on and grab whatever I need to bring.

The other thing that this room needed was some furniture.  We just recently inherited a shelf type thing with drawers.  I am so pumped to have this in our entry room.  I can put the girls' shoes in one drawer, winter hats/gloves/scarves in one for winter time, canvas shopping bags in another one, and the last one I still have to decide on.  Kevin also brought up a chair from our basement and put it out there.  That has been awesome.

Kevin had plans to build a small corner shelf to be the drop spot for his wallet and sunglasses.  He has wasted more time looking for those items than we could probably count, so a nice little spot by the door will be perfect.  His brother recently moved out of state and asked if we wanted the two shelf corner shelf that he had made.  Um, yes please!  The wood was unfinished so we were able to stain it to match the coat rack, and it's been awesome already. 

We have plans to refinish the little drawer table - probably once the weather takes a permanent turn for the nicer.

Eventually we're planning to remodel this room into a mudroom and add a first floor laundry onto the bathroom.  That will give this room a unique shape, but will also be more adequately suited to be an entryway for a family with small children.