Wardrobe Overhaul Part 3 - Shoe Storage

Last time I overhauled my wardrobe I bought an Expedit bookcase from Ikea and placed my shoes like this. 

Which was great! But I soon realised that there was a lot of wasted space in those cubes, 

so I started looking for something more compact. 

Another trip to Ikea recently, and I found the perfect solution:

The Trofast storage shelf! I'm in love! And it holds all 18 pairs of my shoes. 

(Not my boots, they were tall enough to stay in the Expedit shelf.)

I also love that there is space for two pairs to sit side by side facing forwards - 

I couldn't do that with the Expedit shelf.

This storage shelf won't work for people who have very high heels, 

but most of my shoes are low enough to fit within these shelves. 

I made a couple of adjustments for my higher heels, by removing the shelf at the top, 

and sitting the bottom shelf on top of the runner, instead of in the middle of it.

(You can tell if you look closely.)

By the way, sorry if you fall over looking at this pic - it's a small space to get a good view!

So I'm a happy bunny now! 

Next I am going to get some drawer inserts for the Expedit shelves 

to store underwear and pyjamas.

These don't come in until mid-Feb, so watch out Ikea - I will be back!

And I'll keep you posted on how they look!

Love to you!

xxx

Wardrobe Overhaul

Thanks to my hubby, son, and Ikea, I now have something good going on in my wardrobe. All of Jonathon's things were moved out of our little walk-in-robe into a BIG Pax Malm Wardrobe, and I've been able to give my own clothes more space. I haven't finished yet, but here are some before and after pics of my wardrobe showing the addition of an Expedit shelf. Love.

Before:

After:

You might have noticed that I have one shoe forwards, one backwards?

I got this idea from Kate Gabrielle at her pretty blog, Scathingly Brilliant. 

It makes the shoes fit better than if they were both facing forward. Scathingly brilliant!

Day 6 of Blogtoberfest.

xx

Spring cleaning!

What beautiful weather for spring cleaning! 

I cleared out Jack's room today, and gave everything a good clean. So satisfying!

I need to get him some new pics for his room, so will think about that during the week.

I have been inspired by watching episodes of The Block 2011. We didn't watch this series the first time round, so it's all new to us. I'm loving how they spend a week TOTALLY transforming rooms. It got me thinking, if they can take rooms from wipeout to amazing, then I can give our house a do-over without anywhere near as much effort and money!! Surely??

We need to do our kitchen, bathrooms, laundry and master bedroom!

So I'm going to watch these programmes very carefully to see how it's done -  especially the laundries  because they have done exactly what we want to do!

But first, the master bedroom! I've been planning to do this for awhile and just never seem to get to it. 

Well the time is here!

Stay tuned...

Things-to-do list

Happy Saturday! May you achieve many things today!

My list of to-dos includes:

Planning a fortnight's meals:

 (free pdfs here)

Shopping for groceries

Writing student reports (the continuing saga)

Watching old movies

(The Great Gatsby)

and continuing the great bedroom declutter

 via here

Nothing special, but very busy!

What are your plans for the weekend?

xx

A Project A Week - 4 projects in my journal

Just in case you were wondering if I'd managed to simplify my life at all, I'm bringing you 4 pages of my A Project A Week journal today.

Not to say that these projects are absolutely complete, but I've definitely made some progress!
This is the cover of the journal I am using:

And these are the introductory pages
(click on the pic to enlarge, if you like):

My first project was to update my blogs: Achieved!

The Second Project was to sort through my magazines - what a job! I went from 150 magazines down to 20. I'm pretty pleased with that, so this project is now finished and achieved!

Project Three involved going through my hard drive and external hard drive, to find, organise, and label all my photo folders, mainly so that I could find all the photos we have taken of our backyard over the years. My beautiful hubby has done so much work in the yard recently, that it is finally the yard we have always wanted! I will do a post soon, just about our Backyard Blitz,

so you can see all the Before and Afters. 

As I go back to work next week, Project Four has been about planning my year's overview for school, units of study, assessment folders, parent folders, the first week's daily workpad, and generally thinking of ways to make my classroom look fresh and appealing.

My next project is to plan my term's teaching in detail, and then I'm going to move onto doing some of my art for my etsy shop.

I can't wait! xx

Taking Down the Christmas Tree

One of the bloggers I follow was talking about what to do with the pretty boxes from their Christmas presents, and I thought I'd show you what I do - store Christmas decorations in them!

I was lucky to get a Scarlet ghd hair straightener from Jonathon and Jack and it was in such a pretty box! One side opens out when you take off the lid, so I stored all the soft material decorations in that one.

My Mum bought me a pair of sparkly black shoes, and all my round baubles went in that box:

Jonathon and Jack also bought me a pair of shoes, and a bunch of pretty ornaments went in that box:

I received a star shaped Christmas platter from one of the children in my class, and I used that box to store small metal and wooden decorations:

Our friend Richard gave us this box of amazingly beautiful smelling aroma reeds (oh gosh, if you could just smell them!) and I put all our delicate paper decorations in that box:

My Dad and stepmum Jane gave me Heidi Klum's yummy new perfume Shine, so I put all the Christmas cards we received into that box.

You know the clear boxes that hold star bows? I filled two of those with more decorations. One has precious decorations that Jack made when he was in Pre-Primary.

And I got this box of Lindor chocolates for Christmas which is good for holding fragile and little ornaments:

So now the Christmas decorations are all packed away for another year. By the way, when they were on the tree they looked like this:

Oh, such a lovely time is Christmas!

Linen Cupboard Overhaul

I've been a bit distracted lately, and my new routines have flown out the window a bit. But I did give my linen cupboard a makeover and wanted to share it with you. (By the way, this is really the wardrobe in our guest bedroom, not your standard linen cupboard.)

I bought 2 lots of linen storage bags from Avon (they often have good storage ideas) to pack all my spare pillows, cushions, blankets, and linen into. I packed all my winter clothes into one suitcase, and all Jonathon's winter clothes into another suitcase, packed another suitcase full of sleeping bags, and then rested the linen bags on top. It is packed in pretty tight, but at least it doesn't all fall out when you open the door like it used to when it looked like this:

Hilarious! And scary.  I managed to send on 4 blankets, a woollen underlay, and 4 pillows to different pastures, and found proper homes for all the extraneous clutter. I'm glad that's done!

For more inspiring makeover ideas, pop over to mousehouse!

My little work room

I'd love to say that I have a massive room for my desk and all my crafty stuff, but alas, it is all squashed into one of our little bedrooms! However, after adding some more Ikea shelves to the ones we got last year, I can now say that I'm getting things organised - finally! And I'm loving the floor-nearly-to-ceiling bookcase.
The desk attaches to the bookshelf, which I think is genius!

This is also where I blog and do computery things. One day, when I get the opposite side of the room looking fab I'll show you that too! Hee, hee.

Check out Megan's organised linen cupboard ideas here.
Join in her Organised Home Challenge here.

xx

Organising time

It's nearing the end of the school term, and I'm feeling the piles of clutter building! I saw this great price for storage boxes at Kmart, and I say go now, and get yourself some of these to pack away some stuff! Look around your house for things that are in the way, underused and even overused (so much so that you are sick of them.) Pack up some stuff and make way for new things - that's what I'm going to do, because I can feel the seams of the house at bursting point!

I got ten of them!

My Place and Yours

Thought I'd play along with Hello Owl's weekly game, where people share pictures from their homes to meet a particular theme. This week's challenge is to share a favourite gadget. I've chosen this earring holder because I love the way it looks and without it, I would be in earring squalor!

You can get these from Target for $24.95, or Howard's Storage for $39.95. (Come on Howard's, who do you think we are going to choose?!)  I love organising tools!

Wendy xxx

Another five minute makeover

To most, this will be a fairly boring post, but for the people out there who need some organising inspiration, this post is for you! I found some more little baskets, (even cheaper) from a store called Pricesavers. It was $2.50 for four of them. I had been frustrated for a long time with two drawers that hold electrical things, like camera chargers, phone chargers, phones, remotes, batteries and various cords. So, here is how the drawers look now:

And, be warned, the following photos are pretty shocking, or just hilarious, but here is how the drawers looked before:

 How did we live like that?? It was always so irritating!!

Give youself a challenge, buy some containers and makeover a drawer or two. Life will be so much better!

5 minute makeover

We all have one of these drawers, the junk drawer. When you look closely, it's really all about stationery. Well, I popped into Kmart the other day and saw some $2 and $3 small baskets in a sale, and thought of this drawer. I couldn't bear to show you a before photo, but here is the after. It literally took 5 minutes to do, and I even have to take sneaky peaks every now and then just because I  love how much better it looks. So organised!!!

Phoneline working again!

I'm back! Sorry I've been away so long, when I'd promised to post every day this month. I had all intentions, but something weird happened to our phoneline last Friday, and it only started working again last night (Tuesday). We have been without phone, internet, and X-Box for 5 days!! Seriously, it felt like a fortnight!

But I have been spending my time watching episode after episode of a great show on Foxtel called Clean House.

In each episode, they help a family clean the clutter out of their house by analysing why it is so cluttered (and believe me the houses are wrecks!), which enables the family to let go of all their 'foolishness'. They then have a garage sale and the money raised goes towards furniture and fittings to help organise and beautify their home. Love it! So I've been making a huge pile of things to go in a garage sale, (but we'll probably take it to a swap meet), and going though all my magazines, that date back to 1993 (shame on me!) I've reorganised most of the back shed, and cleared clutter from nearly all the rooms in the house. Just the study to go. And now there's only two weeks of holiday before I have to go back to work!! Eek!

In other news, I've posted a book review of The Time Traveller's Wife at Wise Owl Books.

Oosouji Time

To prepare for a happy and prosperous new year, the Japanese preform oosouji, by cleaning and organising their homes, to tie up the old year's loose ends and make room for the blessings of a new year. Good idea. So..... today I've been re-doing my walk-in wardrobe AGAIN (millionth time I'm sure) and I've made it the best it's been yet. No photos yet, maybe tomorrow.

And I've been putting together a Household Notebook to use in 2010. I used one this year but not very well. I've been making it more comprehensive. Download your own version of a household notebook at http://www.organizedhome.com/, and a decluttering calendar at http://www.mysimplerlife.com/, which has daily ideas for clearing out junk! I've got them both in the same file. Also I've downloaded Christmas card lists and gift list plans from http://www.organizedchristmas.com/ to use for Christmas 2010. I'm trying to be organised, I really am.

I wanted to share a pic of the great Christmas wrapping container I bought from Avon this year.

I'm not sold on the colour of it (woh!) but the different compartments were very handy for holding all the Christmas cards, labels, ribbons, paper, stamps, scissors and sticky tape that I used when wrapping pressies.

I've packed it away now, and it fits perfectly against the wall behind a suitcase in our wardrobe. I've noticed they are only in the Avon catalogues just before Christmas at $24.95. Worth every cent.

Well, Happy New Year to everyone! I hope you find your way to my blog in 2010 and get enough of a kick out of it to become a follower, and/or to add me to your blogroll.

For the month of January pop over to my other blogs Wise Owl Books and A Choc-Top and Me to check out my book and film reviews. I plan to post one every day this month, as I've been reading heaps of books and watching a lot of movies that you might want to know about!

May your new year ROCK!

Wendy xxx

Pantry Makeover

There is a new channel on Foxtel called the Style Network and I am in LOVE with the shows on there! They are all about befores and afters, or makeovers - something I feel I strive for on a daily basis in one area of my life or another. (Don't we all?) I love the feeling of accomplishment that comes with improvement. It helps me get ready for my next makeover challenge!

So here's my latest venture into makeoverism - organising our pantry. I can't for the life of me find the before shots (I'll post them when I do), but the following shots are the result of a couple of weeks worth of unpacking the pantry, chucking out heaps, buying containers, packing them and labelling them. The containers (from Woolworths) cost me about $260, which is a lot in one week, but that's a hey of a lot cheaper than some other container brands I know. And the pantry is full to the brim now. No gaping spaces above the food, no shoving things in any old way, no forgetting what's in there, no spilling stuff, and no trouble reaching to the top. And the boxes don't have to stay in perfect order, you can move them round like a tetris, rather than put the boxes back in the exact place.

I think it's a freaking masterpiece! And it only took me 39 years to come up with it! The moment of true glory was having Jonathon's cousin Chelsea jump off the couch with eyes as wide as saucers when I opened the pantry door. It made it all worthwhile.

Inside the pantry door, there's a nifty keyholder we got from Bunnings.

Hope this makeover inspires you!

By the way, speaking of makeovers, you have just GOT to go to this blog if you want to see the most amazing home makeover. The before photos had me laughing and laughing at how shocking they were, and the after photos had me oohing and aahing. Incredible!