Organizing My Messy Laundry Room

Laundry Room Organization idea... IKEA $4.00 wooden spice racks will fit 2 dryer sheet boxes perfectly! 

I, unfortunately am NOT Martha Stewart. I am a messy person. I have a mini-hoarding ailment. I don't like clutter, yet I create clutter. So once in awhile it gets to me, and I realize I'm only one stack of crap away from a true-blue Hoarder!! EEK!

Laundry room "BEFORE I organized a little. What a mess!

So I looked at my laundry area behind the kitchen and sighed with regret that I wasn't one of those kinds of OCDish-organized people I have a love/hate relationship with. I look at them like slugs on a sidewalk trying to figure out why/how they are what they are.
 
 Laundry Room Organization Ideas....I had to do something...I know I'm one load short of being invited onto the show "Hoarders!"

 And I always wish I could figure out ways to become a little bit more OCDish myself!! (and why in the heck whenever I ask an organized person how they got to be so organized they just say, "I don't really know"?) That is not very helpful people!

Messy laundry room needs a little help I think!

So I found myself in another stack of crap piling up on my desk and instead of rooting through the clutter I played on the internet on Martha's website looking for organizational "tips".  They had this cool picture I loved. Don't you love it too? I wish my laundry room looked like this!!

Isn't this so sweet? (well it's also a little bit of overkill...) I love Miss Martha. Here is a look at her other tips.  Did you hear she's on a computer dating website now? Yeah, it's probably hard for opinionated, crafty, super mega-billionaire-foodie, former inmates to find a date!

Anyway, I liked her little racks on the left. We all have stuff in the laundry room like our Shout sprays, our fabric softener sheets and bleach sticks that need a place up off the counters. Well, here is the solution!  I have hooks galore but not as many shelves. (man, look at all her scrub brushes in the little basket on the left wall. WHO scrubs THAT much in ANY laundry room? That's just crazy. Get more out of life people. Toss that darn shirt away if you need to scrub it that much. It's just not worth it! Or go shop for new shirts like I do...it's a lot more fun. LOL

I found myself scrubbing the faucet in the bathroom sink the other day with a toothbrush for like 10 minutes. At some point I realized I just need to go get new faucets! Those things are 40 years old, it's TIME! My hubs stuck his head in the door wondering what all that scrubbing was about and just laughed at me. And then he quickly agreed to go with me to buy new fixtures this week. 

These  COOL IKEA spice racks are only $3.99 each. They look good grouped together too. I've been waiting to find a use for them and I finally did!

Anyhoo......So  I had bought a bunch of these IKEA little, wooden, mini spice shelves I was going to use in my classroom for books-of-the-week to highlight what we are learning about. I still might use a few of them. But I bought 4 and I decided to cop one of them for my laundry room organization project. I think the dryer sheets might fit in there!! So I tried it out!

Check out all of these pictures on the IKEA website for more ideas HERE. Maybe I can use these in the bathroom too.....hmmmm.......how about the garage and all those paint cans and car wax....

 I decided that I would place the shelf with dryer sheets over the dryer, (duh!) aren't I the clever Cathy? Yes I am! But I did think it also would have worked on the back of the door in the laundry room. Here are a few great ideas for around 20 bucks! 

 I might use another one for the bleach sticks, fabric softener, and stain sprays I have lining the washing machine. (Yeah, I'm a clutter nut, remember?).Now I'm thinking of my bathroom. I might be able to do something like this in there to reduce curling iron and hair spray and hair gel clutter. It will probably take me a few months to get around to it though...

With a little clutter here, a little clutter there, here a pile, there a pile, everywhere a pile, pile....E-I-E-I-O!

Find a little corner to hang some hooks for aprons and things you use a lot. I'm really hooked on the hook idea!!

I  put a few hooks in there too for my cleaning aprons and cooking aprons. There never is a good place for them in drawers, they are like oven mitts! They need hanging up. Another thing I will hang there is a grocery bag holder for those pesky plastic grocery bags. I have them in a drawer of all the dumb things. That is just silly. It takes up all the drawer space!

 And I put a broom/mop holder on the inside of the pantry door which shares a room with my laundry room. It is out of sight now and kind of cool!  Yeah, I like it a lot!

Mop and Brooms Organized now! Woo Hoo! Maybe I should mop something? hmmm...... maybe not...

IKEA spice racks made into Snuggle dryer sheet holders. Yeah, I'm crafty!  2 fit in here perfectly!!  

I like how it looks in there now. It looks a little better. I wish I had a giant room like Miss mega billionaire Martha, but my little laundry "area" will have to do. It is a tiny improvement at least. :-) 

 The hubs added this little closet pole to the space between the wall and the laundry room cabinets for more storage. What a good man he is.

I decided this area will be only for my shirts. The area to the right with hooks on the door will be for the hub's stuff. It took me all this time to figure this out? I'm so embarrased! ......like I said, not an organized mind....sigh.....

Laundry Room Rack for Fabric Softeners....it's a lot better in there now.

 Thanks Martha you wizard you! You are simply inspirational! (squealed with joy in my authentic Paula Deen Southern belle drawl...) You go girl! 

Deck Restore Paint Before and After Pictures

We have an old house. I think it is around 35 years old. So this deck may be really, really crotchety! That means old in pig latin. And we redid the flat part last year.  This year we wanted to redo all the posts and cover up those dumb hearts. (Who puts hearts on balconies except the Swiss? Are we living in the Swiss Alps or what?)

The awful Deck.  This is the BEFORE DECK RESTORE picture. 

When we started the project last year we had to do a lot of PREP! Oh my GOSH the deck was flaky. Is yours that way too? Yuck!  I took the power washer and washed off the entire deck really good. It took me an hour or so. Then I let it dry.

Making Glass and Wood Tile Necklaces

I just LOVE these cute handmade glass tile necklaces. I think my little 2nd graders could make these even! They would be a fun craft for anybody. I would even like wearing them. You could make them so inexpensively too! (that's the best part!) HERE at Sabby in Suburbia has a cute tutorial for making her glass tile necklaces.

Sabby in Suburbia had some cute necklaces with glass tiles. I've seen the tiles at craft stores.

I think I'll try these this year for maybe Mother's Day or Valentines Day. The kids could make their moms a cute necklace and it won't break my budget! Kids are really creative at age 7 and 8 too.

I can't decide if I like the square or round shapes better. I love both of them, so colorful! And who wouldn't just ADORE a little scotty dog necklace. I would.


Glass tile necklaces can be made up with square or round, glass tiles. They both look great and are so inexpensive to make you could try and see which shapes you like best. I love the square ones. I've also seen them made with SCRABBLE tiles. Those, of course, are not glass. But they look cool too.

A cute tutorial on the SCRABBLE necklace tiles (using Mod Podge) is right HERE at Make and Takes.com. 

I've seen these SCRABBLE TILE  necklaces at County Fairs and Festivals around where I live. They are really cute! Sometimes I see the game Scrabble at the Thrift Stores too. I will be on the lookout for buying one next time I see one. That way we could get the tiles on the CHEAP!

Another tutorial I found at Not Martha.  She used silicone sealer to put on the back of her necklace tiles after choosing her designs from scrapbook paper. 

Here is a supply list I modified from the great tutorial from Simply Modern Mom.

• scrapbook paper with small designs on it
• glass tiles, circular, or square
• bails* (I used aanraku small size)
• clear glue Diamond Glaze or Silicone Sealer
• super glue or E6000
• toothpick
• wax paper
• ball chains or ribbons ribbons

Design by Simply Modern Mom. The KEY for cute glass tile necklaces,  is to find cute scrapbook paper with some pretty designs on it that lend themselves to these individually punched out squares or circles. 

These cute Glass Tile Necklaces  were from Cathy Peng, linking up HERE.



Here's the materials for making up these cute glass tile necklaces.....

Sun and Moon Gifts HERE is the link.  has a 20 pack of the clear glass square tiles for $3.50 a package. These would be great Mother's Day Gifts for kids to give to their parents in my classroom.  I think I'll try it!

Here's one from Thrifty and Thriving. 
I found another tutorial at Cells Dividing for glass tile necklaces, Link HERE. She uses 2 coats of Modge Podge to her handmade paper designs. They just glue the jewelry chain holder on the backs.

Cells Divided found some really cute artwork to use for her glass tile necklaces check it out HERE. 

So if you are feeling CRAFTY or BORED and need a creative project to spice up life, these glass tile necklaces would be cute jewelry project you could wear with T Shirts and Jeans! I love them.

You can also find the glass tiles online in bulk packs of 24. Check them out HERE at Sunshine Crafts. Or another with clear and colored in a pack of 36 for less than $10 dollars. There is also websites with free printables for the background papers for the glass tiles. They were pretty cute at Plum Adorable.com. These would make pretty and easy holiday gifts. I can't wait to make a few of these darling necklaces!

We Made Homemade Kool-Aid Playdough!

It rained a ton last night and today it was muggy and hot outside so I wanted to think up something fun to do with my granddaughters while I was babysitting today.

Making Playdough out of Kool-Aid is so easy, I'll never buy it again!

I had bought a pile of Kool-Aide packets to make playdough for my classroom kids last summer but I never got around to it. And that stuff was still up in the cupboard. So we pulled them all down, chose our colors (flavors!) and mixed up a batch in about 2 minutes! Seriously, I'm not Kidding! It was FAST!

There are only 5 ingredients in Kool-Aid Playdough besides the water......

My Granddaughters picked out their favorite Kool-Aid flavors for the Playdough.

It took me about 2 minutes to mix up the Kool-Aid Playdough! Super EASY PEASY!

It is soooooo super quick and easy. It calls for the playdough in the mix before adding the hot water, but I wanted to divide the one batch into 4 colors. So I experimented with it to see if we could add the Kool-Aide after it was all mixed up.

Kool-Aid makes great Playdough....it smells so good!

Here were the colors we chose today for our Kool-Aid Playdough.

Do you think they're getting excited to start mixing them up? Oh yes they were!

This is the before picture....nobody has rainbow fingers yet. :D

It worked fine except for one thing; all our fingers were rainbow colors! It dyes you fingers pretty good, but after a few washes you can't even tell. I should've taken a pictures of our rainbow fingers!   What fun we had! And the playdough smells yummy too!

Meg chose Orange and Cherry-Red for her Kool-aid Playdough!

Marisa chose purple-grape and blue-raspberry Kool-Aid for her Playdough.

 KOOL-AID PLAY DOUGH RECIPE
                                 
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup salt
2 pkg kool-aid (unsweetened)                           
2 tablespoons cream of tarter
Mix together then add in:
2 cups boiling water
3 tablespoons oil

Mix and knead for 4 minutes or until cool. 
We mixed it all in the Mixmaster for 4 minutes
then separated it into 4 bowls. Then we dumped
the Kool-Aid into each bowl so we'd get 4 colors! 
Such a great rainy day activity.

Make some soon!

Summer Houseguests- Rules to Live By

How do you like having guests visiting during the summer? I love it because I get to cook for people besides just the hubs. I don't love the manic cleaning of the entire house with a white glove (and I really don't do it very well either,) but I try to make an effort to not have the place lookin' too trashy. I love it when people clean up after themselves though I don't think I was ever very good at that as a guest. Not at all.

My son Devin meeting his nephew Dylan for the first time...and his niece Marisa has missed him! 

One of my relatives has to have family company stay for 2 weeks this summer,  and they have little kids under 5 to add to the madness. That might not be as fun as having your own kids come home. THAT's fun! But it can be awkward if it is friends or extended family.  It is hard to watch other people disciplining their kids in front of you (or a lack of it when needed) and weird bedtimes are hard to deal with when yours are all on a schedule. We remember stuff like that.

We took a fun family pic while my out-of-state son was here....Yee Haw! My hubs is the Sheriff in this town! (and he has deputized Devin into redneck servitude..)

I remember watching some friend's kids while they went on a cruise vacation. One of their kids would freak out every time I opened the fridge and start begging for cheese. She would repeat "cheese, cheese, cheese, cheese!" like for 10 minutes. It was weird. We still just have to say "cheese, cheese, cheese!" and both my hubs and I laugh hysterically to each other remembering.  When her parents came back she had a bite mark on her face done by one of my little darlings. That was fun trying to explain. I think kids have a harder adjustment than the parents do with long stays with relatives or friends. So don't expect them to be their best.

My cute daughter-in-law Cait and sweet baby Lena. She had 2 little shadow sidekicks, my granddaughters think she is the bee's knees. Meg kept saying "I like YOU and I like YOU TOO!" to Devin and Cait. Super cute that one! 

I remember once visiting for 2 days with one of my husband's relatives one summer, when my kids were little. One of my boys, for reasons none of us can still fathom, decided to go poop in the corner of one of my nephew's bedrooms. It was quite mortifying! I mean, how do you explain that tactfully? "Well, maybe he didn't know you guys have toilets too?"  I think he was 3 1/2. You'd think he would know better. But my kids have always had a weird relationship with poop. I Once  found a tiny finger-sized happy face on a bathroom wall by the downstairs toilet.  We still torture both of these "poopers" relentlessly about it today.

Kissin cousins at the barn to take pictures and see the animals..

"Grandma, why is that hen chasing us?" 

Kids act out on vacation usually. They don't know the routine and they are out of their comfort zones. And they don't sleep as well, so they are crabby and sleep deprived usually. So just expect bad behavior from your own kids and especially from everybody else's kids. And get a group of kids together that haven't been around each other much and you can just take my word for it; there will be fighting going on. Even if they do know each other, there will be some fighting. We couldn't leave grandpa's house without somebody fighting with somebody else on summer vacations. And something will get broken. I don't know how he and grandma put up with it all. We had little hellions!

But they grew up not too maimed. Howdy Partner! "Why does mom always torture us into doing things like this?" 

My kids playing with each other's kids.....Tiff with Lena, Devin with Dylan and Caitlin

We just had a wonderful visit by my adult son Devin, and his wife Caitlin. and baby Lena. If there is a manual for houseguests, my daughter-in-law could write it. She is a wonderful and thoughtful guest. My son is pretty good too but I can't take credit. Well, maybe I will. Yeah, why not? They have a darling little 5 month old daughter, Lena, who didn't make a peep, and I mean seriously! She was happy as a clam and just sat there smiling for 4 days.

Can you believe the smile on this baby? It is constant! 

She is one happy girl and a happy daddy too! 

Maybe that made the visit all the more delightful. It was really fun for me to see my kids all showing up unscheduled when they knew their brother was in town. We had a frozen lasagne party impromptu and it was just really rambunctious and loud and fun. All the grandkids together for once was a rare treat too. We had 5 kids under 6.

"We like you Uncle Devin... when are you coming back to live so we can have pony rides and race through the house getting chased by you all the time?"  (I know it's what they are thinking!) :O

Uncle Devin loves these girls...they love to be silly together...he gets down to their level so well.....snicker.....

Little Miss Josie loved having one more girl cousin in the family.....She's a girly girl. 

I loved seeing my newest grandbaby passed around by all the brothers. My daughter was lucky enough to have the first boy grandchild (can you imagine how grandma will spoil this one?). His name is Dylan. He is a smiley one too. How did I get so lucky? My kids (the poop people) were not all that smiley and were always into everything and had lots of cat fights as kids. Somebody was always howling or tattling. But we had roudy fun most of the time too.

I have missed that being an empty nester (crappy empty NEST!). So the hubs has to entertain me when everybody else is busy, poor man! He does a very good job of it too.



 

Tiff won the race to have the first grandson.

I used to be Suzy independent when he traveled when my kids were little. He would be gone for 2 weeks at a time and I handled everything. But now he has to put up with my moodiness, cravings, basic menopausal crap. We have to eat out a lot because, even though I love cooking, I hate cleaning up my kitchen messes (and so does he)!

Gary is my favorite son-in-law....he always offers to put up my Christmas lights for me.  Props for that!  And he loves everything I cook. It is fun to cook food for a man who appreciates it! Note to my sons....compliment your mom on her cooking. It's just good form. 

 MY SUMMER COMPANY RULES TO LIVE BY: 
Here are a few rules I think people need to go by to have a happy summer visit with relatives;
1. Let people know a few weeks ahead of time the start and end date to your visit. And I personally think that with young families visiting young families short visits are better than multi-week visits. I'd cut it down to a week at most. You get to do and say everything in a week's time.  And kids want their own bed back by then, not to mention adults sleeping on a rollaway.
2. As a host or hostess don't plan out your guest's time. It is annoying. It is their vacation. (I remember once a relative got tickets for our kids to all go to a county fair on a visit. But I didn't really want to GO to the fair without my traveling hubs and WITH my 4 little kids alone). Of course I went just to please my host, but it was not fun at all! (memories flood back of multiple kids whining and complaining all day for who know's what reasons and mom enduring hot 100 degree heat with a semi plastered on smile.)

Grandma and Grandpa were always so good to have us come stay in the summertime. They are grand hosts. We loved having them come for dinner a couple of times while we had summer celebrations with family. 

3. Make your own kids' plates of food up and then clean them (and yours) up off the table (and floor) when you are done eating your host's meals. Don't make your host do all that. Help with meal preparation and clean up. My daughter-in-law is so good at this.  And don't say you will be home for a meal and then not show up, or not eat the meal the host has made. That's just a lot of work for nothing. Have one night where you spring for pizza or go out for dinner.  My brother did this when he visited with his family and I thought it was a nice touch if you are visiting people your own age. I'll remember that (even though I never thought of doing it myself.....bad guest that I was! lol)
4. Don't leave money in the guest bedroom when you leave. This is not a hotel. One of my relatives did this once and I did it once too. It is just weird. I learned my lesson.
5. Do leave a thank you note or email after you leave telling what you loved about the visit. It makes your host feel good even if things were not perfect. Or leaving a gift is always nice. lol  (My daughter is really good at this and of course I want to keep encouraging that!) Whenever she leaves the kids with us when her and her hub's go out of town they always come back with a gift for grandma. Props for gifts, I'm just sayin'!

I hope all your family visits this summer are as fun as mine have been. And if not, you need to go get out more, see the world, go on a road trip. Maybe find a nice hotel with a pool. :D