Busy, Busy, Busy!

You know when you have a whole bunch of ideas for blog posts, but you're too busy to actually get around to writing them and uploading photos for them?

Yeah, that's me right now!

I've got a ton of posts in draft form right now, but they're all incomplete at the moment. I thought I'd have a chance to get caught up with yesterday off of work, but instead I spent the day running a ton of errands and cleaning and organizing our kitchen cabinets. My husband never seems to put things back in the right place, so I had a lot of crawling back and forth between our under-the-counter cabinets to do!

We've been super busy continuing on with our mission to de-clutter our house, and we've set a goal for ourselves. By the second week of March, our house needs to be clutter-free. We're scheduling another special garbage pick up for then, so we need to be ready. We've already done one pick up, for a pile of junk that was 8ft wide x 4ft deep x 4ft high (the max they'll pick up), and I think in the next few weeks we'll have that much stuff to get rid of again. And that's on top of all the clothes and shoes we already gave away!

But it feels good. And I think I want to make this a habit. Every year I want us to go through our house and get rid of things we're not using, or are only saving out of guilt (sorry, Christmas gifts from 5 years ago that are still in their package).

In other news, I've been hard at work planning lots of upcoming travel. You know by now how much I love travel planning, but because I'm so thorough (and love researching every possible option and making detailed itineraries that include fun photos to look at), it's pretty time consuming. Coming up, we have a trip to Florida in March with my in-laws (which we're cutting short to spend a few days on a detour further north up the east coast). Then we'll be headed back to our detour spot sometime either in early or late April. And oh yeah, I've also spent a huge amount of time planning and organizing a trip for about 30 people to New Orleans in mid-April. Not to mention that our 1st wedding anniversary is coming up in early June, so I need to figure out where we're going for that. And finally, I need to start researching and booking our summer and early fall camping trips, and put together our summer calendar of all the stuff we'll be doing every weekend.

Boy, that sounds exhausting! But I do like doing things and going places, and I love well planned out trips, so I know it's worth all of the work.

And finally, my husband and I are working on a huge home project, but I probably won't be ready to share it for another month, once it's closer to being ready. We went to Home Depot this last weekend for a bunch of supplies, and are already making good headway. But wish us luck, because I anticipate lots of wanting-to-pull-out-our-hair before it's done!

All of this is to say, posting is probably going to be a little lighter than usual for the next few busy weeks. But I do have plans for another giveaway in March, my blog design is getting an overhaul soon, and I hope to carve out some time to finish up my draft blog posts in the not-t00-distant future. I definitely need to find time to do my Vlog of The Month in the next week too. And I promise, I'm still reading everyone's blogs, even if I'm not commenting as much as usual. When time is tight, Google Reader is my friend for getting my blog fixes, but not for easily commenting. Love you all though, and when I get a little caught up, I promise to be back and spreading my comment love to you--I know just how much getting comments means to all of us bloggers! :)

And since I can't end a post without a photo, here is my youngest cat, Rascal, when he was about 10 weeks old. I don't think I've ever shared this picture before, but can't you see why I just had to keep him?

(He's sitting on a ~6ft high x 7ft wide kitty jungle gym that we built about 6 years ago. It's seen better days though, and soon we'll be scrapping the old jungle gym and building them a better one. Yet another project!)

And for good measure here's a pic my other two, all crazy-eyed from the flash.

Does life ever get in the way of your blogging?

Walk In Closet Bedroom Makeover

Don’t forget to enter my giveaway for one of two $40 gift cards, which ends 11:59PM PST, Thursday, January 20th.

*****

Look, you guys, you can now see the floor in my closet bedroom! :)

If you read this post two weeks ago, about our goal to get our house organized, and de-clutter our lives, you saw the "before" picture of my closet bedroom. Here's a little reminder:

(Yes, there was floor somewhere under that pile of shoes!)

Well, it was quite a journey, but my walk in closet bedroom is finally clean and organized! I think in total I spent about 20 hours picking up all the clothes and shoes and moving them to the hallway, picking up all the lint roller sheets, bobby pins, packaging material and other random things off the floor, vacuuming, and then sorting the clothes and shoes into keep or donate piles, and then further sorting them by tops, bottoms, dresses, etc so I could hang them up in an organized manner. Whew, just reading that all back makes me tired all over again!

In the midst of the sorting madness:

(Sorry for the crappy cell phone pics! Can you spot my kitty hiding out between the piles?)

After I finally sorted out what I was going to get rid of, which wasn't easy, I ended up with 6 full lawn-sized garbage bags of clothes to give to charity. I think I easily gave away half of the clothes in my closet! Bye bye boobalicious shirts from college, and even a few sundresses I hadn't worn since high school (that would be 10 years ago!).

I also struggled with giving up some of my shoes. I know I said I wasn't going to get rid of any shoes, but I did, two huge bags of them. Sigh! They will be missed, but hopefully they'll find a new home where someone will wear them more than once every five years. I still need to go through the big box of shoes I have in the garage, but I wanted to concentrate on one room at a time!

Then it was time to move on to setting up my garment racks and spending HOURS hanging up everything, as well as crawling around on the floor, matching up pairs of shoes.

(Hailey was trying to help by rubbing her face on the shoes and knocking them over.)

So now, here is my finished closet bedroom! It's a really small bedroom (the size you'd prefer for a home office over an actual bedroom), so I took photos in a clockwise direction all the way around, so you could get a 360 degree idea of the layout, starting with a photo taken from the doorway.

This garment rack and the two shoe racks on either side I kept empty on purpose. It's going to be my staging rack, where I'll lay out 3 weeks worth of work outfits and shoes at a time.

The actual, tiny, closet in the room.

I iron every single day, so I need a place for my ironing board to always be set up. Also, check out the purse rack that my husband made for me, out of a scrap piece of wood and screw in hooks!

I've had this dresser since I was a little kid, and still love it. The best part about its location right now is that it is on top of the heating vent. And although it's away from the wall enough to let the air flow into the room, it also makes my socks nice and warm in their drawer! :)

Decor-wise, I think about the only thing this room needs is a window treatment of some kind, to add a little color to that wall. There's so much else going on in here that the clothes and shoes are almost like decoration themselves!

I'm also quite proud of myself for using only what I could find around our house to make some improvements in here. I really didn't want to have to buy anything new for this project, so I didn't.

I was able to find uses for some of the wicker baskets we used at our wedding, one to hold my stockpile of slippers (I seem to go through a pair of slippers every couple of months, so received a lot for Christmas), and one to hold all of my flip flops. Repurposing AND easy organizing at its best!

If you couldn't tell from the 360 degree photos, I was really in need of some additional shoe racks. But since I couldn't buy more, I made one out of some white painted boards and shoe boxes. Not the most fancy solution, but it worked well to get some of the shoes off the ground and utilize the vertical space under the garment rack, and will do for now.

I also made use of part of my window sill to display some of my boots, making it a little easier to get to a few of them. Although most are still just lined up on the floor next to my dresser. Tall boots are so hard to find places for, since they never fit on shoe racks!

As a quick and dirty way of organizing my scarves, I just draped them over the top drawer of one of my plastic drawer units, that I use to hold crafting supplies. It's not the most convenient, although I don't get into my drawer of pillow forms very often, but with limited space, it seems like a good place to store the scarves for now, where they're visible, and easy to grab on my way out the door.

Another basic thing I added was a garbage can under my ironing board. I know, this is a "duh" thing I should have had in here before, but I didn't. And as a result I had SO many used lint roller sheets and little cardboard price tags on my floor before, so hopefully this will be an easy way to keep the garbage from piling up.

I always seem to have trouble keeping my jewelry organized, specifically my earrings, which I wear every single day. Necklaces and bracelets are a bit easier, because they can all consistently be hung up somehow. But my earrings always end up just spread out in a big pile on my dresser, which sometimes means they go missing when they fall into a drawer. So now I am keeping them contained in a little box from a Victoria's Secret perfume gift set. It will be a lot harder for them to fall off my dresser now.

And finally, the last improvement I made to the closet bedroom was a shoe calendar that I got for Christmas! It fits perfectly with the closet room, and now I've got shoe porn to look at in here, as well as on my desk at work (I also got a shoe-a-day desk calendar).

I've actually saved the last 4 years of shoe desk calendars, and someday I want to frame like 60 of the individual shoe photos, and hang them on the walls above my garment racks, or maybe on a wall above my dresser. That won't happen until we own a house though, because that would be a TON of holes in the wall. The hardest part about that little project will be choosing which shoes to frame, since you have to flip the calendar halfway through the year and there are shoes on both sides of the sheets.

So anyway, there's a look at my new and improved walk in closet bedroom! What do you think? Not bad for a $0 investment, and just some of my time! Now I just need to stick with keeping my clothes hung up and shoes all lined up, so it doesn't get messy again. Hopefully though, because I gave away about half of my clothes and shoes, it will be a lot easier to maintain now!

Being Good People

That is our goal for the first quarter of 2011.

Basically, we’ve sucked at being good people for the last almost 7 months, since our wedding (or really, since we got engaged). By “being good people,” I mean keeping our house clean, exercising regularly, and just generally being organized adults.

I often feel like this:

{Cartoon source from one of my all time fav blogs, Hyperbole and a Half. I so want a t-shirt with this on it! And this mug too, while I'm at it.}

I used to be so good at organization. I used to lay out my outfits a month at a time, and plan out our meals before every grocery shopping trip. When we started working on wedding stuff nonstop (did you see yesterday’s post? The wedding was our life for 9 months before the first half of 2010 too!), we just didn’t have time for much else, and basic things like vacuuming and cooking fell to the wayside, especially considering I have to waste an hour and a half of everyday sitting in my car, commuting.

And we haven’t gotten back in the groove of doing these normal things, even almost 7 months after our wedding. Which I've realized is because it's an ugly, never ending cycle. We can't be productive if things aren't in order--and things can't get in order unless we're being productive.

But no more! We’ve set some goals for ourselves, and are going to stick to them for the next three months (I don’t like calling our goals resolutions, because it seems then they’ll be destined to fail).

How we’re going to be good people:

* Set a timer and both spend 15 minutes doing nothing but cleaning at least 3x a week, to take care of the day-to-day maintenance cleaning (I have to admit, this is not my idea, I believe it came from one of my wedding date twins, Mrs. Snow)

* Work out, hike, or get some kind of exercise at least 3x a week

* De-clutter our lives, spending at least a couple hours each weekend deep cleaning/organizing

That last one is going to be tough, but it’s a must-do. Part of our messy house problem is we really have way too much stuff. And I’m lazy. I tend to leave something out of place, telling myself I’ll pick it up later, but there’s still shoes near our front door that I kicked off 2 months ago. And probably 4 months of junk mail piled up on our pool table.

So if we don’t need it, or haven’t used it in the past couple of years, we’re just going to be tossing it or donating it. We need to do this for our entire house, since right now we live in about 2,000 square feet….and whatever size of house we live in, I will fill. So you can imagine how much stuff we have, and it will be impossible if we ever need to downsize to a smaller house (after all, we’re spending way too much on rent right now).

We started the de-cluttering Sunday night, with me cleaning our kitchen and throwing away old mismatched silverware, and only keeping the nice hand-me-down silver and our new set of stainless that we received as a wedding gift. I know we won’t miss our plastic handled spoons that we still had from our college dorm days!

And my husband got rid of a whole garbage bag full of clothes. It was sort of cute, actually. He was cleaning our bedroom while I cleaned the kitchen, and he came out and asked me what he should do with the giant pile of clothes on the floor. I was sure a lot of them probably didn’t fit anymore, or hadn’t been worn in a long time, so I suggested he go through them and see what he could donate. Apparently this was a new concept for him, because he needed my help getting rid of clothes! Not only did we find stuff from college, and maybe even high school (that so didn’t fit now!). He had never, ever gotten rid of clothes himself before. So we went through it all, and had a little fashion show to see what fit, and it was a good start at de-cluttering our bedroom. I think next weekend I need to do that with my own clothes as well, since it’s been about 4 years since I’ve cleaned out my closet. Now THAT will be a project….my closet bedroom right now consists of several giant piles of clothes, an even bigger pile of shoes, my half unpacked suitcase from Christmas, and a narrow trail from the door to my ironing board.

(This was my closet bedroom last spring. It's worse now because I borrowed my 3 garment racks for our wedding, and have yet to start using them again. I think this is part of the problem, we have so much space that we're able to dedicate a whole room to my clothes and shoes, so I abuse it and let a year of, "Oh, I'll just pick that up later" pile up!)

Yes, I think the closet bedroom (and the 3rd bedroom closet, which is half full of my clothes too) is a good place to start with my own de-cluttering. Let's just think of those above pictures as the "before" photos, alright? I probably have at least 4 bags of clothes that can go. But I will not give up a single pair of shoes! Ok, ok, maybe the pairs that have a heel snapped off or coming loose…. (I swear I’m not a hoarder. I’m just generally too lazy to walk the broken shoes out to the kitchen to throw them away!)

How do you keep your house clean and clutter-free? Does anyone else struggle with this, or are we the only cleaning-fail newlyweds out there?

M.I.A.

Hello, my poor, neglected blog!

Sorry, I've been a bit MIA around here lately, I've been super busy. Unfortunately, I haven't been busy doing anything interesting, just a lot of work stuff, and house stuff--all pretty boring really. And I've been away from my computer a lot the past two weeks, at a half week off-site summit for my company, at a Giants game with my department, and then late last week and today IT has been working on my primary computer because it keeps crashing. So all of this has = no bloggity blogging.

But don't worry, I've got a couple yummy recipes to share with you this week, until I have something more interesting to write about (I've got some projects in the works, but they're not blog-ready yet). I think I might be getting the hang of this wifely cooking thing!

Until then, I'll leave you with a picture of me at the Giants game last week, as well as a "before" picture of our horribly messy garage. We've been working on cleaning it for almost 2 months now, and are finally almost done!

(windblown much?)

(Yes, we are terrible, messy people. Easily 1/4th of the mess is empty boxes from a year of wedding supply shipments. I've been just throwing the boxes out here, and it's really biting us in the ass now! But we're slowly breaking them all down and recycling them, but it's slow going when we only have recycle pick up every other week.)

Have you ever hit a blogging slump when life gets in the way?

Post-Wedding Laziness?

Ugh. So it’s been over a month since our wedding. And our living room still looks like this:


The Sunday after our wedding we unloaded our 10ft Uhaul with the help of three members of our wedding party. And by “unloaded” I mean we literally just dumped all the stuff into this giant pile, and it’s been sitting there ever since.

I am just not ready to deal with it quite yet, although I’m getting closer to that point. The mess and clutter need to go away, especially since it appears that half the boxes are empty and can just be recycled. But, I am admittedly a very lazy person, especially when it comes to cleaning.

Although I’m wondering if it’s not so much laziness in this case?

Cleaning up this final mess of wedding décor means that the wedding is officially over. I know, I know, it’s already officially over. Duh! But putting away this stuff, going through it in preparation of selling it, is just so final. And it makes me a little sad!

I was going to publish another post on my wedding blog, that I wrote 2 weeks ago about my post-wedding antsiness, but I'm not sure it's that relevant to the Weddingbee readers, and I'm just not feeling like getting snarky comments about this subject. I've instead posted it in italics at the bottom of this post, but basically it's about how I’m torn between the advice I’d been given to wait a while to enjoy married life, and going all gung-ho right away and making up a thousand new projects to work on. I sort of have a feeling that once this pile of wedding junk is put away, there’s no more stopping and smelling the newlywed roses, it will be back to my normal life. Which is fine. I actually prefer to have things to do all the time and being busy, busy, busy. I just need to find something that will make me as happy and fulfilled as wedding planning did!

And that, in essence, is why I’ve been dragging my feet, claiming I’m too lazy to clean, when really I think I need something to fill my time before I’m ready to give up what has basically been a second full time job for the past 15 months. I just don’t know what that something is yet.

What did you do to fill your time after your wedding was over?

***

Here's the post I wrote a couple weeks ago, but didn't publish on my wedding blog, titled Post Wedding Antsiness

Post wedding, I’ve been feeling pretty antsy.

{Source}

We’ve all heard of Post Wedding Depression, and I definitely don’t have that (I’m totally happy with how our wedding day went and wouldn’t go back and change a thing, and I am definitely glad it’s over. All that planning and slaving wouldn’t have been worth it if there wasn’t a payoff at the end!), but I am finding myself a bit torn.

You see, I’m one of those people constantly looking forward to something. I blame it on the compulsive planner in me, I love to anticipate upcoming….anything. But that means I often times have trouble appreciating the moment when I’m in it, although I do like to look back and fondly remember something.

Because of the way I am, I’m feeling a bit torn between taking my time this summer to enjoy being a newlywed, or jumping right back into the busy swing of things. I mean, aren’t you supposed to take some time to decompress after your wedding, just relax and enjoy some time NOT having a project to work on every single night after work? I thought that was what people have always recommended, but I don’t seem to do well with doing nothing, now that my second full time job has ended! (Just look at our honeymoon recaps, I get much to bored sitting on the beach for long, and need to find some way to entertain myself, even if it’s just stalking crabs with my camera!)

I keep finding myself thinking up new projects, like building the adirondack patio set that we didn’t get off our registry myself, or planning another camping trip for this summer, designing a new 6 foot tall kitty jungle gym, or looking up local festivals or new places for us to go on hikes. I’m antsy for fall semester to start so I can take my last two classes toward my Project Management Certification, so I can consider a job change (and that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms there because I don’t know what I really want to do other than plan my vacations and parties, or be Martha Stewart). I’m antsy for more excuses to be crafty, and started on designing our thank you cards, for no other reason than to have something creative to do (post coming on those soon).

Maybe what I really need are some new hobbies? A part time job? Or one of my friends needs to get engaged so I can help out with their wedding projects? Or perhaps I just need to learn how to enjoy the moment, and figure out how to give myself a break for a while? Sit and smell the newlywed roses, and all that jazz? I’ve got no clue, so any tips or insights would be appreciated!

Have any other newlyweds out there felt this way? And if you’re not yet married, which end of the spectrum do you think you’ll gravitate toward after your wedding, jumping right back into busy life or taking some time to enjoy being a newlywed?