Christmas Storage ~ Tricky Thursdays

We have a condo and it really fits our lifestyle. We do not have the time to maintain a full house or yard and it is wonderful that we have a gym and pool just outside our building. The one thing I do not love is the lack of storage. I have a lot of stuff. I am still trying to give things to people and we built the shelves in our master to get things that we have stored out where we can enjoy them. As of now we have never ever had a car in the garage and I would like to change that now that my commute is about an hour and I leave so early when it snows I would really prefer to not have to scrape my windows. A few months ago we received a bed platform from my mom and Greg for a wedding present. It was already a storage bed frame it has six drawers underneath. There was a lot of room between them. 

I fit three whole tupperwares between them. This will mean that I will have to take the bed off twice a year, once to take them out and once to put them back in but that is just one more thing out of the garage. Now I can put something else in those totes in the garage. Maybe something that is on the floor right now. :)

Bathroom Linen Closet Redo

There is a double door linen closet in our master bathroom it is one of the things that really drew me to the condo, the master bathroom and the kitchen. This linen closet is AMAZING! If I could change anything I would make it a little deeper. But it is better than anything I have ever had before. 

You can see that it was pretty messy, about wishing it was a little deeper, when Mikey folds the towels the doors won't shut, but how can you say anything when he is folding them. I also store all of my paint in there as we have an external garage and that does not work in Colorado. 

We started shopping at Sam's Club which is great but there is definitely a huge stock pile of toilet paper for just the two of us. I already took a labeler to a bunch of shoe storage to have like items together so I did not have to mess with that this time. 

I also have all of my CDs and Software in there which is kind of weird but since they are all already loaded on my Ipod or my computer they are all just long term storage anyway. 

So I refolded all of the towels, reorganized all of the cleaning products and filled the entire second shelf with toilet paper. 

All of those containers on the top shelf are empty.

On the other side there were sheets (see the West Elm duvets in there), extra products and paint on the bottom I had to put down some of that spongy drawer liner stuff because two of them have rust on the bottom. 

The top two shelves really did not change much. 

Then I added the little hook for our paint key because I am always loosing it. 

My Paper Mess

So my New Years Post I was talking about my paper clutter issues:

I will have my paper boxes transfered over to electronic copies, no small task as I have already mad over 1,000 scans and I have at least six or seven boxes in the guest room and I cannot recall if I have any in the garage and at this very moment I am too much of a chicken to go and look 

It is something that I have been working on to the despair of Mike and my living room, it is a hot mess in here right now but I am making progress, To date I have seven full shredded bags of information not all of that I chose to scan in but you have to protect yourself.I also have a very large box of just recycle. I love taking ideas from magazines. On hair, make up, outfits, recipes, projects ect. But not all of them are still applicable and while I used to make thirty percent of my clothes I have gone away from that in the past few years and I do not feel like I need to keep that stuff. I also just need to take a day and go through my old college papers and see if they are on my computer, they all should be and then just get rid of the hard copies. That would probably be a whole extra box of stuff I could shred. I also recently decided that I need to reorganize my school stuff that is on my computer. Right now it is all separated by semester which was a good idea while I was in school but not such a great Idea now, I am going to take out all of those extra folders and just have the classes. Now that I am a few years removed I cannot remember which class I took which semester and I cannot really think of a reason why that would be relevant. I also need to make sure that I have no duplicates. One day I will be done for now I just need to look at this:

Well I am off to work, the maybe to Sam's Club I need a twelve pack of non childproof lighters, I do not smoke it is for a project, I will blog about that later,  then a doctor's appointment (which happens to be right across the street from a Goodwill I do not frequent, but will be stopping by today, and no I did not plan it that way. However I will take advantage of the situation), stopping and then heading home to work on a project for my brother.  

I am not dead or anything....

Ok... I know I have been a little absent for a few days, Mikey surprised me the other day and let me know that we are hosting his friend Josh tomorrow night. That cut three whole days out of my timeline that I was already stressed about. He also had finals this week. His last one was tonight. Hooray for them being done. :) It is not done yet but here is a little sneak peak of what I have been up to:

Remember what it looked like before?

Much better now huh?

Remember what it replaced?

Save to repair, what to do with all of the extra stuff

A lot of people are probably out shopping this morning. I had not shopped for clothes for a while before this last week. I now have a few very cute sweaters and a sparkle tank top. (I never got in to The Hills but it turns out that I do like Lauren Conrad's clothes) I like to make sure that if something happens to the clothes that I can repair it, at the same time I hate having extra buttons on the inside of the shirt because it is harder to iron them correctly. I am against anything that makes ironing harder as I do not like it that much to begin with.

You will need a few basic supplies to complete this project. Labels, mine are white of the generic shipping type labels, little ziplock bags there will be very small parts like beads you will need to keep in, and I like to see what is inside as opposed to small envelopes that are opaque, a pen because I am so neurotic I keep the same one with the supplies so that all of the labels will be the same, and a seam ripper for all of those shirts that have the extra buttons on the inside.  

Gather all of your extras.

If you have the tag from the store they can be very helpful, a lot of times they describe the item so that it can be distinguished from a lot of very similar items at the store. If not describe it yourself. I use the brand what type of clothing it is, the color and any other applicable adjectives. Write out the description on the label and decide how you want them to be laid out. 

I faced the ziplock part of the bag to the right and then placed the label in the upper left hand side, this is what you get when you are done. Then the only thing left is where to store them. I have a whole box for repair or upkeep of items where I keep shoe polish and such. Of course if you do not have something like that you could put them in your sock drawer or with your sewing supplies.