The Black Hole

I don't know how the rest of you feel but I'm sure glad my kids are back to school in Arizona! I finally have some "free" time. LOL I sent my three children off for the first day of school yesterday. Surprisingly, they were excited to go! The morning was great too. They got up and got dressed without a fit. I got them out to the bus stop on time. The bus on the other hand was 15 min. late:( The bus driver apologized over and over telling me that he will be on time tomorrow. I should have gotten that in writing! He was nearly 15 min. late again today. It really wasn't that big of a deal since the bus stop is outside our front door:) I'm sure the day I expect him late he will be on time or early.

So, now that the kids are off what am I doing in my "free" time. Well, it's not all that free since we have a new addition to the family. My little Nikki was born this past April and has grown so fast the last three months. I love spending time with him just one on one. But the first two days of school I kicked him out! I hired our old caregiver to watch him while I got into my office aka "the black hole". I stopped working full time out of the house about two years ago. My scrapbook room/office/catch all room is now a disaster! To help me get this fixed I came up with a plan...

How I think I want to clean and organize my craft/office space.

I have a large area to cover (we remodeled our two car garage). It was easier for me to take sections of the office at a time instead of the whole room. My first attack was the items that are not meant to be in this room. I decided if these items were worth keeping and started a donation pile. The remaining items went to a new place in the house.

The next plan was to weed through the boxes that piled up. My husband likes to just pick up a pile of things and throw them in a box. Which then ends up in the black hole. How I manage to find anything is beyond me! I divided the findings from the boxes into categories, trash, scrapbook, business, bills, donation. I designated a section of the room for my scrapbooking items and business stuff. All bills that are under a year old I put into a clear container for filing. With everything sorted into piles I was able to manage the mess much easier. The garbage and donations items were taken out of the room. Because I'm picky about how to organize my scrapbook stuff it was the last thing to be organized.

The first pile I sorted through was my business materials. I also do cooking demonstrations for Pampered Chef. Any paperwork that I needed for this was filed in a two drawer cabinet. Since I had most of this separated to begin with it was much faster to put away. If you want specifics on how I broke it down, let me know. I won't bore you with the details otherwise:) My Kreative Kids Fun Mail stuff was a different story. I have a lot of craft materials that I use at shows. Things that I knew were not going to be used I took to the school for the teachers to use. All my paperwork was filed in the other drawer of the two drawer filing cabinet. The rest of what I was keeping went into clear containers and stored in one of my cabinets.

We also have a four drawer filing cabinet that I used to file personal matters. The top drawer is for bills, second draw for taxes, third drawer for insurances and personal id items, the bottom drawer is for all manuals for anything we still owned. I don't like searching for things in drawers that are stuffed so most of these are half or less full.

The final pile was my scrapbooking. I could probably open a store with the amount of things I have. I admit that I do more collecting then actually scrapbooking. I hope to change this soon! I designated areas for my tools, which was mostly the tops of my cabinets (they are waist height or slightly higher) so they are in plain view and easy to reach. I rearranged a few pieces of furniture as well. If you don't have a bookcase for scrapbooking I highly recommend one. I bought mine from IKEA years ago. It has 5 cubbies high and 5 cubbies wide. They are approximately 13" square. Now if you scrapbook this is important because most pages are 12x12. I purchased the paper holders from the Cropper Hopper. They are slightly too high to fit into the cubby so you will need to trim them. A box cutter works great:) I divided my shelves into sections. Top shelf hold photo albums, completed and not yet used. The second shelf is for paper and the start of embellishments. The third shelf is for embellishments. I organized these with the kasset boxes from IKEA. The fourth shelf is for my ribbon (bow making) supplies. I have pull out drawers that fit perfectly from Iris. I picked these up at Office Max when they were buy one get one half off and they were already on clearance! The bottom self is for pictures. I found small Iris boxes with the drawers that fit pictures. They will stack two to a cubby. I also have photo boxes. I have yet another cabinet that I used to hold my projects in the works. My husband constructed shelves that are about 2" high. I have three rows of 9 shelves. I found clear boxes at Michael's that are big enough to fit 12 x 12 paper. They fit in the space exactly. I place items for a specific project into the box. This way I can just grab a box and have everything ready to go when I get a minute to put a page together. I used a few of the boxes to organize my stamps/ink too. They also come in handy for each child to store special projects to use in scrapbook pages later.

The final task in this space was to organize my bakeware. I got into cake decorating a few years ago. I have way too many hobbies, but I'm never bored! My husband brought home a wire rack that was given to him. Instead of filling my kitchen cabinets with things that I only use a few times a year, I thought this would be a great place to put them. I do candy making too... All my bakeware items are placed in clear containers and labeled. Each container is placed on a shelf so I can either see it from the side or front.

Now that I have my plan in writing I will succeed at organizing at last:) I will be sure to post a few pictures of the room once it done.

I hope this has helped some of you with either motivation or ideas on what to do:)

Barbie
www.KreativeKidsFunMail.com