My problem areas

With all the thought that I've been giving to becoming a professional organiser and all the research that I've been doing into organising, its made me think some more about my trouble spots. Those things that just keep biting me on the bum (no I'm not talking about my husband). The things that I just keep failing to make work in my house. 

According to a lot of the things I've been reading and podcasts I've been listening to (btw I'm currently totally addicted to the podcast Take Control with Nicki Kinzer), the general consensus is that if you are continually running into problems with something then you need to improve the system or put a better system (or just a system!!!) in place to resolve it. 

I have identified my 3 main areas where I struggle time and time again:

1. Planning ahead
2. Bedroom/wardrobe issues
3. Laundry

1. Planning ahead

By planning ahead I'm talking about things like packing the kids bags back up with nappies, pants ahead of time. I did try to do it the night before but I just found that as soon as they are in bed I flop and find myself unable to do much else. And packing the bags, while I would LIKE it to be top of my list, by that time of the evening, it just ISN'T! 

So I've decided that rather than trying to do it the night before after the kids are in bed, I'm going to start doing it as soon as they walk in the door. I work (and they go to childcare) on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And unless we are going out for a long period on my days off or the weekends, their bags are left untouched until the morning of the next working day. While it is always a little bit hectic when they walk in the door - they are always demanding toast or biscuits or TV the minute they come in (and I'm keen to just give them whatever it is they want so I can have a nice cup of tea - I know, bad parent that I am) but I figure that its just one more thing to do and I'm already still on my feet at that point. Its AFTER I've sat down that the impetus to get up and do anything is really an issue. 

I am in the middle of drafting another post which is a review of the iPhone/iPad app HomeRoutines and I'm updating this as a kind of diary of how I get on with it (how I find it helps me - or doesn't - with managing these tasks). I will upload this blog post when I have more to put in it. I'm slowly building up routines for it but I don't want to overwhelm myself and then give up which is what I've done before. 

2. Bedroom/wardrobe issues

This morning, and in fact every morning that I'm getting dressed for work (I work in an office), I get extremely frustrated by my wardrobe. I hate it. I have several issues with it. I will list them now:

1. Its too small. I hate having to share with my husband. I wouldn't be so bad if we had one side each but because of the layout of it we have half of a rail on the right side of it and one rail each on the left side (which is divided vertically). He has the lower half for his shirts and I have the top half for my things (except his ties are at the left of my rail and a couple of his jackets are on the very right of my rail. It just drives me CRAZY!!!! I DON'T WANNA SHARE!!!!! (sobs hysterically and kicks feet like 2 year old child). 
2. The clothes are outdated and old and I don't even like a lot of them anymore. I've been doing Weight Watchers since December 2010 and lost nearly 3 stone but in the last year or so I've been yo-yo-ing a bit and have struggled to keep the momentum but I won't go buy any new clothes (apart from when I'm in desperate need - although its getting that way now) until I've got to my goal of 11 stone. I really want to have a good old chuck out but I'm holding back because a) I need to save some money to buy new things with and b) I want to wait until I reach the size that I want to be (a UK size 12). I'm currently a 12 on top (mostly) and a 14-16 on the bottom. But I would like to comfortably be a size 12 all round (even a 10-12 on top). 
3. Because of the layout of the wardrobe nothing is very well organised and, even after I've tried to organise it, it gets messy again very quickly which tells me that the system I've put in place when I've previously organised it is simply not working! 

My ideal solution would be to move house, to somewhere with either an entire wall of wardrobe space or even a walk-in wardrobe with plenty of shoe storage. Sadly, that ain't gonna happen for a few more years! But in the meantime I am just not sure what to do. I feel like until I can purge a lot of the unwanted items from my wardrobe, I'm not going to feel happy about it. I don't like the cupboard space where I keep my tops. I reorganised the top shelf a few months back and I LOVE the boxes that I used in that space, but what do I do about the bottom space. Its too deep a cupboard for what I use it for now which is - pajamas on one side and tops on the other. However, I don't like to stack all my tops in one place as I have different kinds: work ones, going out ones, t-shirts for days at home, vest tops.... I can really only put 3 piles side by side and there is so much unused space that it feels such a waste - in fact, as a whole it feels like I barely use 20% of my wardrobe right now. Ideally I'd like to hang most tops on hangers (I bought some beautiful fuscia hangers a couple of months back) but I'm not sure if I have enough space to hang up those items. 

Anyway, I think I could go on and on about what my IDEAL solution would be and how much better my wardrobe could be if... well, if it was a completely different wardrobe and different room in fact. But I don't have that option right now. And I'm not sure waiting until I've lost weight (in 2-3 months) is going to help. I need something NOW!!! I need a system that works for me. So I am going to do the following: as soon as I have a space of about 2 hours I'm going to lock myself in my room. With a pack of bin bags and plastic boxes and be utterly ruthless with my wardrobe. Then make a list of what I need - clothes and storage solutions. I'll write more about that when I get around to doing it. 

Laundry

Laundry. Where do I start? In my house Laundry is probably my biggest issue. I usually try to keep on top of it on my two days off at home but notoriously I only manage to do some on ONE of my days off which means I'm really only tackling it once a week which means that on one day a week I'm trying to get through 4 or so washes a day. I don't have a tumble dryer (much to my sadness) so really after about 2 washes we run out of dryer/radiator space and we can only really get this many washes hung up and dried in a day if its sunny outside. And even then that's assuming I'm there to keep checking if the clothes are dry and replacing the dry stuff with wet stuff. 


The other issue is that once I've done the monster (how it feels to me anyway) task of washing and hanging 4 or so loads of washing, I have no energy left to actually put stuff away so that gets left to another day when we have time and so we end up with either a massive pile of dry laundry, or a massive pile of wet laundry waiting to be hung up. Basically laundry is my biggest housework nightmare at the moment. 


The solution is probably to keep up to date with laundry. Do a load or so a day. As soon as there is dry laundry, fold it and put it away. I'm going to try to do this. 






I am going to post this blog post now. Apologies if its a bit rough around the edges. I start writing it about a week ago. I've been feeling a bit harrassed due to trying to juggle too many balls at the same time and I just want to post it or it will sit around for another week or more!

Hand bags

Another thing I did today. Will make this a quick post and mainly just add the photos as you can really see what I did through them. 


As you can see from the before shot my handbag storage was a little cubby hole at the end of our wardrobe cupboards. The only problem with this was that I had to pull everything out to find what I wanted and I would often (always) just leave them strewn half way across the floor - as you can see below:

We had one of these wardrobe space-saving hangy thingies that I stopped Ben from throwing out a few months ago, and I'm SOOOO glad I stopped him because its PERFECT for this. Fits perfectly right at the end of the spare room wardrobe (as you can see, my littlest child Lala is admiring my hanging skills):

I love the way I can access anything I want without having to pull out the whole lot. I also grouped the bags by type. 

At the top I have my daytime/summery type bags. 3 Animal bags, which I love and always rotate back to eventually. Then 2nd shelf down, my expensive(ish) leather handbags. 

Next shelf down my evening bags. Then under that purses. As you can see there is plenty of room on that shelf for a few more things. I just haven't decided what yet. 

Then under that (2nd from the bottom) all my toilettries bags. 
Lastly, my large summery-type bags and beach bags. 

 Finally at the very bottom under the shelf I put my blue Estee Lauder carry bag (freebie - very useful size). 

Was very pleased with how this turned out. 


Just to recap. Before:

 And after:

Make-up Drawer (Part 2)

Following on from my last post (I know you were waiting on the edge of your seat - haha - no really, I know you probably weren't!). What I kind of had in mind was to cover the boxes with fabric. But then after buying a magazine full of lots of freebie card papers, I decided that covering them in pretty paper would work just as well. 

Just to build the suspense.... here is the BEFORE picture again:

This is how it looks when all put together!!! 

SOOOOOOO much prettier:

This is how it looks when its all filled up. 

It felt so good getting this little project done. I'd been daydreaming about it for ages. 

Hope you like it. 

Feel free add comments. xxxxx

Make-up Drawer (Part 1)

I'm SOOOOOOO excited about this. 


I was going to do a blog post about reorganising my makeup drawer. But to be honest, all I did was move things around. 


What I REALLY wanted to do was make it all prettified and make it look completely different from how it looked before. 


I'll start with how it looked BEFORE:

I made the boxes to fit in the space. Some I made from scratch. Some I just added dividers into. While I was quite pleased at the time, it didn't look amazing. You can probably tell from the picture above, but I had all lipsticks and lipglosses together (right front). All eyeshadows together (front middle), a space for mascaras, lip liners and eye liners (far left). Then at the back middle, things like foundation, powder presses and blusher. Also some compact sets that I've accumulated over the years (which to be honest I barely even look at). 


The other day while I was having a break from studying, I decided that my brain needed a 10 minute break from Java code and so I did a bit of reorganising bit by bit. 


First of all I took everything out of the drawer. 

Then I got some double sided sticky tape and some cardboard and made some more dividers to divide up the boxes that were already there. 

I started with the lipsticks and lip glosses. I decided that rather than have them divided up by type (ie lipsticks vs lip glosses) I would divide them up by colour. The more I thought about it the more logical it seemed. I mean, usually when deciding what makeup to wear I would think, what colour goes with what I'm wearing. Not "would I rather be matt or glossy"!

So I made divider sections (and of course labelled them) for:

• Clear
• Nude/gold
• Pink - pale/daytime
• Pink - dark or bright/evening
• Red

I also put lipliners in the relevant colour section with its lipstick or gloss counterpart. This made sense to me as I don't have that many lip liners. Here's how it looked:

Once I'd done that, I removed all of the eyeshadows from the section next to the lip stuff:

 I decided that I'd rather have a couple more sections there too. Originally I only had one section - for all eyeshadows. As you can see above, I added another one, but I then decided on three sections for:

• pale or base colours (for me usually a cream or eggshell colour
• everyday darker colours (mostly brown)
• anything else that I'd likely use for an evening out

Here's how it looked:

 Then I did the section where previously I had put my mascaras, eyeliners and lipliners. As the lipliners were now with the lipsticks and lipglosses, I had an extra compartment free so I put the following in each compartment:

• Mascara
• Everyday eye-liner (normal black or brown)
• Going out eye-liner (eyeliner pens, glittery eyeliners, bright colours)

 One more thing I did was to take all the compact cases of eyeshadows and break the lids off, and stick them down into this box lid. I had been thinking it would be nice to get myself a nice lipstick colour pallette but I haven't got the funds right now and I was SOOOO chuffed when I got the idea to do this. It means its more bulky if I want to take it anywhere with me but to be honest I never really used these at all, let alone when I went away. I tend to take my favourites with me when I go away. Here is how that looks:

And this is how the finished drawer looked. 

At the time I was pretty pleased with myself. Wait until you see what I did today though!!!


I'm going to be really mean and leave you in suspense as if I don't go to the gym now, I'll never get off this sofa!!!!


Click here for Part 2

Dressing table - update

Following on from my post Making My Bedroom a Haven....


You can't always do everything you want to at the time you want to do it. For instance, when I tidied up my dressing table, it felt like quite a big job just to clear the surface and put all the stuff away - let alone reorganise all the drawers, but you shouldn't let the fact that you don't completely finish a job either a) put you off starting it altogether or b) continuing with it in small steps. 


I had a nice lie in this morning (until 10.30am) and after having a shower I had a bit of time before leaving to meet my friend and I opened one of my drawers and had an urge that I couldn't ignore, to tidy it up. 


This is what it looked like before (I remembered to take the "before" photo - YAY!):

All a bit of a jumble as you can see. 


I took everything out of the drawer onto the surface and divided it into piles...

Nice empty drawer

Manicure type stuff

Nail varnishs (all in a bag)

Took nailvarnishes out of bag

Party type stuff - glitter, fake eyelashes etc

Nail care stuff

Some smaller manicure type stuff

I found a nice metal tin for the party stuff which, although I rarely use it, I hate to throw it away as  it could come in handy one day

And this is what it looked like when I'd finished. 

This only took me about 10-15 minutes - and this proves my urge to keep all boxes!! It just goes to show that even if you don't have tonnes of time or energy, you can acheive something in a short amount of time. Tonight or tomorrow I might do one of the other drawers!

Making my bedroom a haven

My bedroom is usually the last place to get my attention because its the place I crawl to when I'm tired and its the place I crawl out of first thing in the morning when the kids insist on getting up. However, lately I've read quite a few blogs that said that prettifying your bedroom can make a big deal a) to how you relax in the evening and b) to how easily/quickly you can get ready in the morning. I always HATE how messy my bedroom is. So, I've been doing a bit of rejigging. I'm kicking myself I didn't take any BEFORE photos but TRUST ME. It was bad!!! 

I started by buying these lovely boxes from Ikea. I made the labels myself as I thought black labels with gold writing would stand out more than the standard cream labels:

I've ordered them so that the things I use less frequently (yes, sadly stockings and suspenders etc are used less often than tights) are on the bottom row and more frequently used items on the top. I love how these boxes fit so perfectly in the space. I only bought three originally and I'm so glad that my friend Emma managed to get me another 3 and posted them to me! Thanks Emma!

I haven't figured out what to do with the bottom shelf yet. It still looks a bit of a mess. I might ask my dad to put in an extra shelf so that I have two less deep shelves rather than one massively deep one:

I've had my eye on some pink velvet hangers for months now - since I saw some in TK Maxx but we'd already spent a small fortune that day anyway on post-Christmas stuff so I didn't get them. However, I decided to treat myself and this is what they look like. Again, I'm kicking myself for not taking a BEFORE photo. I should also mention that I've kicked my husband's suits out of the bedroom wardrobe (to the spare bedroom one) as he works from home and rarely wears them. Sensible? I thought so. We'll see what he thinks when he gets home!!! Annoyingly I can't seem to rotate the pictures! Grrrr

I also found this in the cupboard for shoes so I could have some of them out rather than being tucked in the drawer under the bed or scattered on the floor of the wardrobe:

I also attacked my dressing table which looked like a bomb had hit it. This is what it looks like now:

My friend Lisa gave me the blackboard label clip things and I haven't found a use for them until now (she bought them for me to label my products when I was making and selling bath bombs and things but I stopped doing it shortly after she bought them for me). I put all my daily creams and potions in this Ikea box:

This box has been hiding in a corner of the bedroom and I wasn't sure what to do with it but I thought it looked really pretty on my dressing table so I put some small tester creams and cotton wool pads in it:

Mirror drawer: I put some makeup essentials, and other bits and pieces, making sure to keep things in little boxes so they don't get all messy again:

That's all for now on the wardrobe. 


xxxx