Organizing our House

I'm addicted to Pinterest like almost every other woman in North America.  One of my boards is an "organization" board.  I pinned a great pin on organizing your home that gives you one project each day (31 days total) to help get your house organized.

Now, I'm naturally an organized person (you may not be able to deduce that from a random visit to my home).  I live for binders with labeled dividers.  I love my label maker.  Having cute file folders from Container store and a file folder holder makes keeping up with all the school papers so much more fun.

But to be honest, our house could use a little help.

About a year ago, I worked on our laundry room/mudroom area.  We all take off our shoes upon walking in the house (means less mopping and vacuuming for me!) and the kids' shoes were always in a big jumble by our back door (in the laundry room, which leads out to the garage).  Also, we needed a place for the kids to put their coats in the wintertime and backpacks during the school year (rather than on the floor, which used to be customary).  Also a place for me to put my purse and boxes that needed to be mailed or items returned to stores (the kitchen counter just wasn't cutting it anymore).  So here's what we did.

I like to hang my clothes immediately when they come out of the dryer (no ironing for me!).  Since we're a family of 5, that's a lot of clothes to hang.  I had a galvanized metal pipe cut down to fit between the built-in cabinets and the wall.  I then made my own brackets to hang the pipe out of some scrap wood. 

I then bought these wonderful closet rod divider tag thingies from Container Store.  Makes sorting everyone's clothes a little easier.  A second rod above the first holds empty coat hangers.

To organize the mess of shoes, we use this cubby from Lowes.  To organize rain boots, mittens and scarves, sunglasses, and other seasonal things that tended to get lost in our closets, we use these stackable drawer units from Lowes.

For the kids' backpacks, I bought this long wall-mounted rack with lots of hooks. 

 

That rack matches pretty closely to another shorter wall-mounted rack I got for my purse and items that need to be returned to stores.  (above the hooks are the kids' chore boards.  we won't mention that they don't get used often)

The way we organized the kid's coats/hoodies/umbrellas is a little less sexy.  We just used 3M Command hooks all over the wall at heights the kids could reach.  But it works and was relatively inexpensive.

I also more recently replaced the 3-way light switches with motion detector activtated light switches.  

So that area of the house is now fairly well organized.  After looking at these pics, however, I think the laundry room could use a fresh coat of paint and a new color. 

Now that leaves the rest of the house to be tamed.  *sigh*  Maybe I will take up the 31-day challenge.  I know our house could use the organizing!