Here we go again........

Am starting the Apartment Therapy Cure this week....again.  I did this in Autumn with some good results, although I had to admit defeat by week 7.  This time I will last the course.

I'm not really focusing on one room, it's going to be a general organisation of the whole house.  Things don't run smoothly here when we're cluttered, which I suppose is much the case for everyone.

To find out more about the cure see here.

The picture above is the otherside of the playroom, the one with the map mural etc.  Posts about this room are here and here.  And these shelves, well they're just not working for us.  Endless rows of books the kids don't read (their faves are in their bedrooms), muddled up playmobil, photography equipment, craft supplies (that we can't reach), boardgames, puzzles (yes with missing pieces...why do I hang on to them?), toys outgrown or broken, paperwork that I forget to action.

So if nothing else...these shelves will be fabulous by the end of the cure.  To start with we'll be painting them white, and then I'll be seeking inspiration from all my favourite organising blogs to make this area function properly. 

Any tips or ideas please go ahead and share!

Apartment Therapy Cure Week 7 and a confession

Paper snowflakes from RE(unrelated to this post but aren't they stunning?)

It's time for me to confess - I've officially abandoned the Apartment Therapy cure with only 1 week to go.  This weekend there was such a lot of other important stuff going on and I just realised I couldn't sustain all this domestic goddess stuff!

So to finish off officially I just wanted to look back and capture what I've learnt along the way:-

• I love fresh flowers in the house - particularly in my little bathroom where they are now an almost permanent feature.  A £3 bunch of flowers can be split up between vases and make a huge difference in how a room looks.
• Organising is not a one off process - my cured kitchen cupboards, coat cupboard etc need maintenance to stay that way (I think I overlooked this part).
• Getting rid of clutter has a much greater effect than you anticipate it will.
• My husband, The Queen of Clean is extremely useful.
• Any home project takes longer and costs more money than you intend.
  
• Life still needs to go on and you need to accept when enough is enough and you're done.

Thank you to all the comments from fellow cure project bloggers - cowgirl in wellies, This Home Sweet Home, Alana in Canada and Misadventures in Procrastination.  I have enjoyed looking in on your progress and will continue to follow you all.

Garage - The After

 

The garage has been rather a labour of love this weekend.  Our thinking was that once it is sorted, everything else inside the house will run smoother.  We can store things more efficiently, get going on DIY and gardening projects and save money by buying in bulk.

The whole exercise was prompted by The Queen of Clean getting some free industrial shelving and plastic boxes from the warehouse at his work.  So this transformation involved:-

• taking a people carrier sized boot of rubbish to the local household recycling site
• fixing the industrial shelving securely to the wall so there was no danger of it collapsing on us!
  
• moving stuff we don't often use up into the rafters
• rejigging things so the tool chest is on the workbench at the back of the garage
• lots of sorting out wires, tools, equipment and general garage 'stuff'

I'm sure it's fairly obvious that my part in this was limited - I was more of a teamaker and general cheerleader.

I love this little area at the end of the industrial shelf.  He left a gap in the chipboard shelf so there is a little nook for our garden tools.  No risk of them falling out on you.

 This metal shelf at the end we are using for biking equipment, shoes and helmets.  It is actually a Habitat kitchen shelf that we had 2 houses ago.  How I loved that shelf! (I threaded it with fairy lights one Christmas and left it like that all year).  Sadly it hasn't fitted into any of our kitchens since, but now it again has a purpose.

So whilst all of this was going on outside......I was doing lots of this with the kids inside.

I hope those of you on the Apartment Therapy Cure journey are still sticking with it!  Let me know how you are getting on?

Garage - The Before

The saying is 'a picture speaks a thousand words' so need I say more?  This garage is our junk room - although we try hard to keep our living space in the house organised, stuff literally gets thrown in here.

This week it was a nightmare navigating my way to the chest freezer with carpet grippers all over the floor.  Ouch! Enough is enough.  It is our goal this weekend to get this organised.  Hope to be back tomorrow with some shots of our progress.

This will be in place of any Apartment Therapy work on the bathrooms (it is their turn this week) which are just *grim*.  I will also take some photos of those to prove that they are beyond help at the moment.

Apartment Therapy Cure Week 5

Confession time, I am really having a hard time keeping up with this Apartment Therapy Cure.  A combination I think of 3 evenings last week keeping me out the house (lots of fun but very disruptive), and this major caffeine withdrawal from giving up Diet Coke.  I know it may sound over the top but I have just felt horrendous.  Zero energy.

Anyway, this week was focused on the office.  I don't have an office exactly, but we do have a playroom with a computer in.  This room is due for a transformation, but I don't think we have the budget or energy to get this done in the Apartment Therapy Cure unfortunately.  In fact I don't think, I know!  I am going to keep it underwraps until it looks beautiful!

I have managed this week to:-

Delete all the photos we don't want.  Lots and lots have gone.  I've been trying to learn to use the Queen of Clean's SLR and it has resulted in millions of not very good pictures.....so I have been brave and hit delete (is it just me that finds that difficult?)

Copied all the important dates from various scraps of paper into my diary.  And if you need a diary recommendation please please check out Organised Mum's Lifebooks.  Ignore the name, you don't need to be a Mum to benefit from these.  They have stickers (who doesn't get excited over a sticker?), tear out shopping lists, meal planners, budget sections....the list goes on.  I found these 4 years ago and haven't used anything else since.

Apartment Therapy also wanted you to edit your books but I am quite good at keeping these under control, and already sorted the kids excess books out a few weeks ago.....so I missed that step.

So it's baby steps for me at the mo on the Apartment Therapy Cure front, but I am pleased with what we have achieved so far and am not going to get frustrated.  I think (and please agree with me!) that any challenge like this is about putting your own spin on it, and taking as much as you want  from it, or can manage at the time.

A little tour of the living room

 

This week the Apartment Therapy cure is focusing on the living room.  So I've been having a bit of a tidy up - nothing too drastic but a bit of 'tweaking'.  Here are the results. 

This is actually a lounge/dining room and I do have a table and chairs the other end of the room.  I'll post some more pictures once I've sorted it out.  It looks a bit too empty at the moment and I'm trying to work out how to fix that............

By the way the room never usually looks as tidy as this.  Could only get it like this once kids were in bed!

Apartment Therapy Cure Week 3

This week I was supposed to focus on 'The Landing Strip' i.e the hall/entry way and ensuring everything is running as efficiently as possible.

Now I have mentioned before about our 'Command Central' so feel this side of things is working quite well.

I did however this past week clear out the little coat cupboard in our hall and move all of the redundant shoes etc out.  Now brace yourself - I am going to show you a 'before' picture.  I am really embarrassed of this.  Please remember my usual excuses when viewing:-

• I work full time
• I have 3 children
• I am naturally super disorganised (it is my husband 'The Queen of Clean' that is the ordered one).

Okay?  Taken that on board?  I'll let you have a look. 

That was bad wasn't it?  And onto the improved version.

Now I appreciate that this is not a 'fall off your chair' transformation.  But it is working for us.  We still need to carry the wooden floor through to this cupboard so the floor you see is grimy floor tiles and the new polysterene underlay from the wooden floor.  Much of our home is still work in progress.

Another move I made to stop so much junk mail arriving for us is registering with this site:- www.mpsonline.org.uk  This is a free service which removes you from direct marketing address lists.  I used them before in my old house and they were fantastic.  It takes a couple of months to kick in but after that you will no longer get the endless catalogues, invites etc.  If you are interested do read it all carefully - you will also be taken off existing databases so you may need to re-register with companies you do want to continue to have a relationship with (in my case Boden!)

We also this week:-

 

• had our windows cleaned for the first time ever (felt very decadent).  We have been homeowners for 11 years and have always managed to do this ourselves, but we are struggling with old sash windows now which we can't clean from the inside.  We were charged £12 for 13 windows (less than £1 per window!) so that felt okay.
• put up a new cloak room ceiling to replace our one which had a huge hole in from a leak in the bathroom (this was unknown to us until we moved in - top tip do look at ceilings when viewing properties)
• raked up about a million leaves from the garden
• made some adjustments to our understairs cupboard so we can now fit the ironing board in there.  I would take a picture but it really is just too boring!  Perhaps once I've painted it white and it all looks beautiful.

So it has been a frantically busy time but with not much to show for it.  So I'll leave you with these to compensate.  Our halloween pumpkins :)

Apartment Therapy Cure Week 2

This week I bought some fresh flowers, I was supposed to do it last week as well but procrastinated over cost etc.  Anyway I got a cheap bunch of white freesias and split them into 2 vases - one on the fireplace shown above and the other on my bedside table. 

So for this week the Apartment Therapy programme wants you to focus on the kitchen.  One of my big issues in the kitchen is the constant battle with paperwork.

We have (or should I say had!) the above filing tray that permanently looked overloaded like this.  I could never find stuff, and important stuff would be lost in amongst junk mail as the temptation was to dump 'everything' in the tray. 

So my solution to this endless pile was to chuck/shred/file my way through it and then make a memo board for the important stuff remaining.  I had this idea to get some cork tiles and glue them to the inside of the cupboards - I got this idea from another blog some months ago and hands up I can't remember where.  Anyhow......the long and short of it is I visited 3 DIY stores that informed me nobody wants cork tiles anymore and you can't get them.  They kind of looked at me funny implying that I was behind with the times.

So I ended up with 2 cork memoboards which the Queen of Clean attached to the inside of our cupboard with a screw.

I threw the rickety filing tray away (not very eco friendly sorry) so I wouldn't be tempted to fill it up with random stuff again.

Here's the other memo board full with it's useful paperwork..............the school dates are my real issue so I made sure I included these somewhere I can easily see them.  I'm the Mum who always forgets the cake sale/non-uniform day/harvest festival.

And then I gave the cupboards a really good clean out and organising.....ahh just look at that, nothing falls out at me when I open it now.

Also on the apartment therapy front this weekend we have:-

• bought a mat for the kitchen that the kittens can be fed on to contain the mess a bit more
  
• put *loads* of shelves up in the garage on some industrial racking that the Queen of Clean got free from work - this is still work in progress but will post some pictures once finished.
• bought some more skirting board to finish off our flooring project that has been ongoing for months
• I also visited some home shops to try and get inspiration for our playroom..........but made the crucial mistake of taking a 6 and a 3 year old with me.  It was a damage limitation exercise and I ended up very uninspired.  

And just on a final note here is this weekend's crafting activity.  Very economic involving the drawing pins from the new memo boards.  Simply take assorted fruit and veg, white and red drawing pins and a black marker pen.

And hey presto.........

What can I say?  This activity was a result of wet weather and kids bored with their Mum cleaning out kitchen cupboards.  The lemon and mushroom did also get transformed but were quickly removed upstairs to my youngest's bedroom as ornaments.

Thanks for staying with what has become an extraordinarly long post.

Apartment Therapy Cure Week 1

So this was Apartment Therapy week 1.  This week I was supposed to:-

• Remove one item from my house and put it outside
• Buy fresh flowers
• Sit for 10 minutes in a part of my home that I never sit in
• Choose one room to focus on for redecorating
• Look through images to get inspiration for said room

And this is what I managed to achieve...........

• I chose this image to sum up how I want my playroom to look (I already have this cushion and I don't know if that is what makes it feel so familiar).  I love the grey on the walls here and the vintage armchair.... and all the 'stuff'

• The Queen of Clean did his part scrubbing the grout in the shower with an old toothbrush, whilst protesting 'I can't believe you are taking a picture of this'.

• We built a house with paper walls for a boiled egg (not strictly on the list but still in the interior design 'arena')

• We did a lot of playing and tidying up.

• We took out an exercise bike from our bedroom.

• I threw out lots of boardgames that were incomplete.

• I didn't buy fresh flowers but I did mean to.

• But we did get two black 10 week old kittens from the kitten rescue.  Here is one...

Meet Martha (the other is Rose and looks identical).  Have you any idea how hard it is to take a decent picture of a black kitten on a charcoal sofa?  That is my attempt to explain the poor shot above.

Again not strictly on the Apartment Therapy list, but a lot more fun than fresh flowers.