My Organizing Weekend

Ok, I've finally been able to sit down and write this post! And it's long.

Saturday David and I went over to our friends "the K's" house to help them with some honey do's. Like I said in Monday's post: My Intentions they are expecting baby #2 soon and had several projects that really needed to be done.

First up was their garage. Back in June the four of us spent an entire day cleaning, purging and organizing their garage. These are the original before pics.

Ok, here's the original after pics.

Well, like most families when winter hits you don't go in the garage much, things don't always get put back where they go because it's cold and Christmas brings more stuff and old gets put in the garage. So we ended up with a messy garage again but with the bones of the organization still intact. The organization was still working for them but we just needed to tweek a few things.
Here's the newest before.

It didn't take us very long to get the garage back in shape a couple of hours really. The guys had a car load of recycling and Goodwill to take, stuff needing to go in the attic, items to be returned and general clean up.

Here's the after.

They can now breathe better when coming home after work.

Next up was the kitchen.

Their kitchen has good storage but it just needed to be purged and a few adjustments to where some stuff was.

After spending the last year gradually working our way through their house getting it organized, we've realized that using baskets for wayward items worked great for them. So, we used baskets for several things: tupperware, sippy cups/kiddo cups, lidded cups, bottles & accessories and snack items.

I was a bad blogger and didn't take before pics of the cabinets BUT, I did get a before on the areas before adding the baskets.

Here's the tupperware cabinet:

We purged a ton of tupperware and this is what's left. However tupperware has a bad habbit of spilling over, lids being lost or shoved to the back. There is a ton of space in the cabinet but it was hard to get to the stuff in the back. So, here's what we did.

We went to Dollar Tree and picked up a bunch of baskets that would work for each area. This cabinet had room for 4 of these baskets on the top shelf. We only needed 3 though, we separated the snack sized from the bigger sizes and labeled the baskets to help remember. This is so awesome because they can just pull out a basket to get to everything they need. And they can utilize the back space because they can pull the front basket out to get to the back one.

Next the cup cabinet:

In this cabinet they like the lidded cups and kiddo cups as well as lunch boxes and koozies. This cabinet also has tons of room but things would end up pushed to the back and hidden.

Here's the after:

We had room for 4 of the big baskets on the top shelf, but again only needed 3. The bottom shelf has 2 baskets for lunch boxes/coolers and a small one for koozies. AND has tons of extra space left over!

Now I didn't get a before of the bottles (I thought I had) but here's the after.

We relocated them from another part of the kitchen, in anticipation for their upcoming use. They are right next to the plates, bowls and general cups. But this will keep them from tipping over in the cabinet and from falling down everytime the door is opened. We also loved the colors and they will make Mrs. K happy to look at them!

We were very pleased with the results, we sent 3 trash bags full of kitchen stuff to Goodwill.

We found a lot more space in the cabinets than we thought they had. And we made it a bit more user friendly.

I wanted to share this with you to show you how we organized in a way that works for "the K's". Hopefully this will help others in their efforts.

I absolutely LOVED doing this! I get so energized when I do projects like this and I want to keep doing more!

I'd love to offer tips and help if anyone is interested, just leave me a comment.