Time Spent

I have spent a lot of time recently trying to get myself organized. We moved from a 3 bedroom, 1 (very small bath) house to a 5 bedroom, 3 1/2 bath house in August of 2006. We moved the first week of school (I was teaching 4K at the time in Public school) and I was pregnant with MC and had lots of morning sickness. We just threw stuff in boxes and tried to get out what we needed. Now you know the background and with that being said...
I am trying to get organized so that we can find things when we need them and we can get rid of some things we don't need to create more storage space. So far, I have my pantry and cabinets organized and my laundry room. Here are a couple of pictures. Unfortunately, I didn't take before pictures. (You can see before pics of the pantry here.) But here is the after pics.

This is the pantry. I took out all the pots and cleaned out a cabinet to put them in. I think that alone was an improvement. I used a shelf that I found in one of my kitchen cabinets that wasn't being used for bottles and several baskets and containers for smaller things like cookie cutters, small packets, etc. It is a big improvement even though it may not look like it in the picture.

This is my laundry room. We keep our medicines and cleaning supplies in the cabinet on the wall. This keeps little ones from getting into them. Anyway, everything was just piled in the cabinet with no order and there were lots of stuff on the floor so when everyone put clothes in there you could not walk through. Now I have baskets for my medicine with 4 categories: Pain, stomach, cold/flu/allergy, and prescription. Z needed cough medicine last night and it was so much easier to find. I am working on a first aid basket but it will have to be stored somewhere else because I'm out of room in that cabinet. There are baskets against the wall on the floor that hold extra things like shampoo, soap, toothpaste, etc. I may have to move those somewhere else but for now it is working.

Now for my next project:

I am going to work on converting this small walk-in closet in my upstairs hall into a craft "room" for me. I need some space to call my own that can hide all my many projects. So when I get finished, I will post pictures and see what you think. It has been well worth the time spent to get my organization projects finished. And it makes me feel so much better. I'm off to bake brownies for church tonight. So I'll try to post more tomorrow.