Category Archives: Organizing for Dummies

161 days until we have a tiny human to take care of – ahhh! So what do I think about when I wake up in the middle of the night? Organizing our house and decorating the nursery of course! Ben asked me if there’s anything we could do this weekend so I’ll be less stressed. Love him!
I will be donating my get-ready room to our baby. This was a no-brainer because it’s the most climate controlled room in the house and the quietest since it’s an interior room. My beloved leaning mirror will move to the guest bedroom.
Pretty much all of the furniture will be cleared out of this room except for one dresser. This was my childhood furniture growing up and I plan to paint or refinish one of them for storage/a changing table. Where will all those books and the filing cabinet go? I have no clue.
Here’s the other dresser. We’ll be adding a crib and a comfy nursing rocker of some sort. New curtains, bedding, a rug… so much to do!
Even though this is the most organized closet in our house, it will need to be completely cleaned out (apparently babies wear clothes) and its contents transferred to the guest bedroom. No big deal, right?
Wrong! How do I describe this monstrosity? This is our luggage/boxes of books/extra clothes/crafts/staging items/bedding/my wedding dress/junk closet. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a kitchen sink in there somewhere!
There’s not a lot of extra space for furniture in this room, but we will definitely need to add a dresser on this wall between the doors. This will remain our guest bedroom which will definitely be needed for lots of company after baby comes. I don’t want to crowd it, but we’re running out of space people!
Ben the hen’s closet in our master bedroom will need a good cleaning out as well. I would love to get everything off the floors of all of our closets if possible. Lots of this stuff needs to go live in the storage shed.
Can you believe when we moved into our house 8.5 yrs ago that we didn’t have a single thing to put in here? We didn’t even own a lawn mower! I’m thinking an industrial shelf could do wonders for organizing this space.

The weather forecast for this weekend is rain, rain and more rain, so we’ll probably be sticking to inside organization. Wish us luck! I’ll be back next week to make sure we aren’t couch potatoes all weekend report our success.

We have four teeny-tiny closets in our 1,056 sqft house. Luckily, we only have one pack rat in the family (hint: it’s not me). When we were planning to move, I packed up several boxes of books that have been sitting on the floor of a closet.
Last weekend I got a wild hair. I decided to pull those boxes out and put all the books in stacks, forcing us to come up with a game plan.
Unfortunately, this only resulted in there being books on every flat surface of this room for the last week (a.k.a. driving this perfectionist insane!).
One of the biggest problems were all these photo albums, journals and binders. Most of them are too tall to fit in our bookshelf, so where could they go?
I took a little inspiration from my favorite childhood book and decided that all this room needed was a little organization.
I started off by clearing out the top of the closet in that room and making room for all of the too-tall photo albums. I desperately want to find a solution of what to do with all of our printed out pics that we don’t have a digital copy of. At least for now they’re somewhat organized and all in one place!
Next, I went through and pulled out any books that I knew we would never sell in a million years – you know, like Twilight and our Bibles:)
Then I placed the rest of the books in 4 boxes and set them out of the way on our guest bed. We know that a lot of these books are worth something – Ben scanned in one of his undergrad religious books and it was selling for $40! My goal is to eat this elephant one bite at a time and either sell or donate all of these.
The most important thing, was that my get ready room went from this…
to this – whew! Perhaps putting our lives in chaos while tackling this project wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever had.

Speaking of ideas… next month is going to be referred to as No-Spend April here at Staging by M. Ben jokes that the problem areas of our budget are food and me. I’m doing this partly for our budget and partly because of the challenge. I’m hoping my competitive spirit beats out my love of shopping.

Anyone have any advice on the best online places to sell our old books? Should we invest in a good scanner or mail our pics off to be scanned? Who else besides my hubby has had to consider joining BA (Bookaholics Anonymous)?

There are few things I like more than simple makeovers that make a big impact! I mentioned in this post last week that I invested in some wood hangers for our guest room. After our friends had come and gone, I decided to put these hangers to a more permanent use in Ben the hen’s closet.
I have wanted to replace our flimsy plastic hangers for awhile now, but I had no idea how this small change could completely transform a closet! Here’s a before pic to give you a better idea of what I’m talking about.
This pic was taken awhile back and isn’t a close-up, but I didn’t even think to take a before pic until I was halfway through and realized how amazing it looked. I picked up this 30-pack of natural wood suit hangers at Bed Bath & Beyond for $16 ($20 – a 20% off coupon I always use there), but I’ve also seen them reasonably priced at Target and Wal-Mart.
Doesn’t it look like a fancy men’s clothing store rack? I will definitely have hanger envy until I invest in some of these for my own closet! I just can’t get over the WOW factor of what a few hangers can make. It’s polished, organized and practical (no more of those annoying hanger wrinkles to iron out). I know  huggable hangers are the newest craze, but I haven’t been too impressed.

Are you all as blown away as I am by this simple closet facelift? Any other hanger reviews out there? Besides rehanging clothes, I’ve been jumping off the couch every time I hear a delivery truck drive down our street patiently waiting for my new curtain panels to be delivered so I can continue piecing together our newly acquired master bedroom.

Remember that time I shamelessly revealed our junk room? Maybe this pic will help refresh your memory…
Ahhh, THAT junk room – it’s all coming back to you now, isn’t it? Well, last week we received an email from some of our best friends who recently moved to Ireland. They offered us a California King memory foam bed that they left behind for FREE! We said “Heck yeah” which was quickly followed by “Awww crap” because we had no earthly idea where this giant bed could go in our house. There was only one room we knew it could fit in – the junk in our junk room had to go!We started by making one of those one phone call solutions and scheduled a pick up with the VVA (Vietnam Veterans of America). They took a lot of the big pieces we had to clear out – full size bed, dresser, 2 TVs, a giant dry erase board and a blue chair we couldn’t even sell for $5 at a yard sale. Whew, that felt good!
The next step was to fill our car up with stuff that needed to go to Goodwill. The VVA would have probably taken this stuff too, but we were taking baby steps and didn’t have all this together yet. Yes, that is my old school original Nintendo in the blue bag. Remember how you used to have to blow in the games to make them work? This was the result of all our hard labor:
Only one simple bookshelf remained and we were relieved to find out that the bed would in fact fit in that room after taping it off on the floor (we probably should have checked that in the first place). I bet you’re wondering where the rest of our stuff went.
We moved everything that was left from the junk room/master bedroom to the guest bedroom. It made me sick to my stomach that my cute guest bedroom had turned into what looked like a landfill, so I spent 4 hrs. doing some major speedy shovey (as our friends call it) to make it look like this:
All that was left was to go pick up our handsome new bed and introduce him to his new home. After finding a truck to borrow and some muscle (apparently memory foam beds are like moving dead, lifeless bodies), we got ‘er done.
It came with a platform frame and was pretty easy to put together. Ben tackled it in about 20 minutes while I served as the family Social Media Coordinator and took pics and tweeted – it’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it!We couldn’t be more thrilled with the new bed even though we haven’t actually gotten to sleep on it yet – ha! We didn’t have sheets that would fit, but my favorite Target organic sheets have been ordered and are on their way. They happened to be on sale this week too, so I splurged and ordered two sets.
Nobody in our house is more excited about the bed than Cali. She loves having a bed she can easily jump up on and we’re pretty sure she thinks it’s exclusively for her. She obviously gave it her paw stamp of approval.

Today we made our final drop off at the post office and shipped 30 lbs worth of old textbooks to a company called GreenTextbooks.org that either reuses or recycles them for free. It only cost us $14 to ship them as Media Mail and it was worth every penny knowing they won’t end up in a landfill!

I’m a little too giddy about all the decorating possibilities for this room, so stay tuned. And that, my friends, is how we put the bed back in bedroom.

I’ve noticed lately that when I tell people that I am a home stager, one of the first things they say is, “Oh, I bet you have an amazing house!” I usually respond by saying that I do love our home, but that it is a work in progress. Nobody has a perfect house and that’s why I’ve decided to share with you one of our deepest, darkest secrets. Ladies and gentlemen… our junk room!Ouch, that stung a little like pulling off a band-aid. In our defense, it is especially cluttered because we moved a bookshelf and filing cabinet out of there this week and the contents that used to be in them are everywhere. Hubby got office space for his private practice and needed those pieces. The sad thing is that we Ben cleans this room out about once every 6 months, but it still gets this bad.Another cause of the clutter is my creativity. You heard that right – all the projects I’ve been blogging about often have “leftovers” such as these book dust jackets from this project. There are also a couple of floor lamps, pictures and lots of pillows that I moved out of other rooms and then didn’t have a home.I wish we could say that we don’t use this room, but hubby’s closet is in here and it’s the closest thing we have to an office. Some other items of interest are the giant white erase board, multiple chairs we don’t use, and a box TV that no longer works since we got rid of cable. Oh, and there’s a twin bed buried under the pile of (fill in the blank) in the corner.

It’s tough to step away from a project when it’s your own stuff, but the stager in me would first ask, “What is the purpose of this room?” I would then say to myself, “Self, I want this to be a guest bedroom/project room.” Ideally the only furniture in there would be the twin bed, filing cabinet (repurposed as a nightstand), a reading chair, and a small bookshelf.

So where do we begin? As the African Proverb goes, you must eat an elephant one bite at a time. I’m hoping to gain some insight from this book I keep raving about and go from there. There will be sweat and whining, there will be multiple trips to Goodwill and craigslist drop-offs, but the end result will be a purposeful space we will love!

My hubby may have cringed when he saw me snapping pics of our clutter for the blog. Maybe airing our dirty laundry is just the motivation we need, so stay tuned! Confession time – what cluttered room in your house sucks the energy out of you? Anyone have a foolproof plan of tackling a space like this? What is your favorite room in your home and why?