Day 3 & 4 Planner Challenge

3 - Month at a Glance

4 - Planners Galore

♥ Luv From KerrieLynn, The Mix Gal

Day 1 & Day 2 (Brown & Stuffed)

If you happened to catch yesterday's post you know what this is all about....I am participating in a contest that A Bowl Full of Lemons is sponsoring - two things that I love - Planners and Contests!

Day 1: Brown 

Day 2: Stuffed

♥ Luv From KerrieLynn, The Mix Gal

November Planner Challenge Contest

I love to organize and I am still old school enough that although I like technology - there is still something satisfying about writing things down in my good old fashioned planner. 

Image used by permission from a Bowl Full of Lemons

I am the same way with books - although I would love an e-reader, I still love the feel of holding an actual book in my hand while I am reading. I recently discovered a great blog, A Bowl Full of Lemons written by Toni Hammersley and group of peeps that shares my love of planning and decided to participate Toni's November's Planner Challenge.

The rules are simple - take a picture that represents the category shown for that day and post that picture!  We don't even have to take the pictures in order and the topic is open for our interpretation.  Toni even offers a free planner insert to help you track your progress.  I will be posting pictures on my blog as the month goes along - I invite you to participate and/or follow along in my progress.

Happy Planning!

♥ Luv From KerrieLynn, The Mix Gal

Back From My Break!

I took a little time off from both blogging and Facebook due to an extremely busy family schedule.  I love having a work at home business that allows me the flexibility to take a break when I need it! 

I have added a new feature also - you can now sign up for my monthly newsletter (click on the Newsletter Signup button to the right) which will feature recipes, tips and more from me - The Mix Gal!

I am still working on organizing and setting up my new office space and one I have it complete I will be posting some before and after pictures as well as pictures of the process.  I have never had my own office/craft room before so you would not believe the amount of stuff I have managed to accumulate over the years and it all has to be organized.  Unfortunately I cannot figure out how to best organize it until I "weed out" all of the junk and donate items - and I have a lot of those!

I think I have the organizational systems down for the smaller items - they will be stored in a combination of clear plastic shoebox size containers and mason jars!  I went out and bought 10 of the shoebox containers and yes, I do have enough stuff to fill them all!

Stay tuned for pictures coming soon and thanks for your patience while I wade through this mess!

Free Dinner Planner

I wanted a simple, yet fun weekly dinner planner and this is what I came up with!  This is free for your personal use and free for you to modify for your personal use.

All I ask is that you please leave me a comment if you are planning on using!  Enjoy.....

I Turned My Coat Closet Into Our Pantry

Although we bought our house brand new one of the things it was lacking was a pantry and since kitchen cupboard space is tight I had to put my creative thinking cap on.....
I am the Queen of re-purposing and making do with what I have so, it didn't take very long before the creative wheels were turning and I decided to turn our hall coat closet into a pantry.

At first Hubby and I were going to put in actual shelves, but when we looked at the framing pictures we realized that two of the closet walls did not have any sort of structural support that we could attach shelf supports to.  Attaching the supports to sheet-rock and then putting canned goods on those shelves seemed like a recipe for disaster.  We decided to go with pre-fab shelving.  We ended up with a hodge-podge of different shelves but I made it work and every inch of the closet it utilized.  Next on the agenda is some kind of lighting for the pantry - as you can see it is very dark!

Our coat closet pantry

Upper half of the "pantry".  Notice the "Sikkens" shelving unit -
I "stole" it from the hubby.

I used a shoe/jewelry organizer for all of the small mixes

Lower half of the pantry.....yes, it still could use some more "organization",
but it works for me!

Almost Home......

Right after we moved in....our brand new furniture.  This view is from the
living room looking towards the back of the house (Kitchen & Dining area).

I have been so busy around my house that I haven't had time to compile any new posts in just over a week!  They do say that "Time Flies When You Are Having Fun" and I have been having so much fun lately.....

Standing in the Dining room looking
towards the front of the house.

Are you curious as to what I've been doing?  The not so fun part:  putting away all of my Christmas decorations.  The fun part: as I have been putting away the decorations I have been slowing re-arranging furniture and putting up new vignettes ~ no I have not taken any photos yet because everything is not "just right" yet.  Once I get the furniture situated and see what I have to work with I plan on taking a trip to our local thrift store to pick up some new decorative pieces.  All of these new blogs that I have found have given me so much inspiration to work with. I know Rome wasn't built in a day so I will have patience and add to my house one special piece at a time.

Looking at our plain fireplace and walls.

Right now I have a pretty blank canvas to work with and I've arranged the furniture in both the living room and the dining room in a totally new way.  I cannot believe that in two and a half years of living in our house that I have not done this arrangement before now........both rooms seem so much more spacious and open!  Since our house is so new it has the "open concept" going on - which boils down to the living room is open to the dining room and the dining room is open to the kitchen.  None of the spaces are very large and I have quite a few furniture pieces (some of which will go into my new craft room once it is completed) so it does tend to feel pretty tight at times.  Our house is about 2,000 square feet but right now we are doing most of our living in the upper floor which is only about 1,100 square feet (similar to apartment size).  The downstairs of our house is a work in progress - once it is complete we will have two more bedrooms, a small recreation room (the Man Cave) and a laundry room/bathroom combo.  We are 3/4 of the way through the sheet rock stage and we are trying to the work ourselves, neither hubby or I are very adept at these types of things (we have been learning as we go) so it has been a long process.

We will get this project done and hubby has promised me that it will be done before the summer is over this year ~while optimism is great, I still have the "We Will See" attitude..........

~Keep Life Simple by Mixing It Up! TM

Thank you for stopping by ~

Get Organized with Duct Tape & Vinyl?

I have had a problem ~ paperwork overload from my kid's schools!  Papers, papers and more papers which includes calendars, homework schedules, homework, spam from outside sources, fundraisers, book order forms and more!  If you are a parent who has kids in our public school system I am sure you can relate!  My kitchen island would turn into a stock pile of paperwork and we quite frequently missed deadlines, homework was late, tennis shoes were not worn on P.E. days, the book orders missed the deadline and so on and so on!  I was a organizational paperwork failure! 

It's not that I haven't tried various systems to make it all work.....I've tried the 3 ring binder - one for each kid, but that requires that you open up the binder to see what is going on or coming up and the binders always made their way into the computer cabinet to clear up counter space and only worked for about a week.

I also tried clear file organizers like these ►

I had one file for each of my kids and one for "Miscellaneous", these worked pretty well if all you wanted to see was the first page of whatever was "filed".  Then came the crash........after about 9 months of hanging up (with industrial double sided sticky tape) they came crashing down to the floor!  I ended up with a headache and a huge paperwork mess, not to mention the computer cabinet which now boasts sticky tape remnants on the side.  Moving forward......I thought to myself, well maybe I could use my refrigerator and attach everything with magnets, pretty soon the fridge was gone and I had a 6 foot tall paperwork cube (at least that is what it looked like)!

My last and quite possibly my most brilliant idea came together when I started thinking clear vinyl, duct tape and the removable 3M sticky tabs (the kind you usually use for their hooks).  My first step was to "sketch it out in my head" and then sketch it out on paper, then finally make patterns.  Once I determined that the patterns would work, I started on the real deal!  One thing to keep in mind is that my day job is working for a sign and awning company so I was able to get clear industrial strength vinyl from my work.  I think you could probably get similar clear vinyl at a fabric store and to save on costs the back piece would not have to be vinyl. 
Here are the steps:

1. I cut out one long back piece, one bottom pocket piece slightly taller than the rest, and eight slightly shorter pieces.  
2. The next step was to trim the top of each piece with duct tape, including the top of the long back piece. 
3. Lay out the long back piece on the table and duct tape the bottom of one of the eight shorter pieces onto the back.  You will need to utilize some good math skills to make it all work together. 
4. Lay the next of the eight pieces on top of the one you just taped onto the back and tape it at the bottom, I left a 3" gap from the top of one piece to the top of the next.  Continue until you are left with the one piece that is slightly larger than the rest - it should now fit flush with the bottom of the backer piece.
5. Tap the bottom of this piece and then tape the sides of the whole unit.
6. Attach however many of the 3M removable double stick tabs you think you will need and attach any embellishments to the front.
7. Remove the paper from the double stick tape and attach the whole thing to the fridge.  My unit is so large that I removed the paper from the tape in sections....first I attached the top, then the middle section and finally the bottom.

My unit is rather large so that I can have the bottom piece be the calendar, then I have Monday through Friday spots, one Saturday/Sunday spot, a Future Spot and a Miscellaneous Spot.  It may not be the prettiest of designs, but it works and we haven't missed a "deadline yet".  I purposely left off the exact dimensions that I used, because

          A) I misplaced them and

          B) You may not want yours to be as large as mine.....

As long as you create paper patterns first to see how it all works you can just use the patterns!

The unit is designed so that all of the pages will go into their respective slot in landscape
mode, the edge of each paper sticks out about three inches to make it easy to grab. 

 

The bottom slot is the only one designed so that you can see the whole page -
the idea is that you will only change this paper out monthly.

This is the calendar at the bottom, it is the only window
that you can see the whole page.

I used inexpensive foam stick on letters to label each section.

This is the top which has Misc. and Future categories!

My hope is that you can use this to create your own little organizational hub! 

Daughter's Room ~ Before -n- After....

We watched our house being built two years ago and finally moved in to our first home the end of June 2009, it has been a long process (room by room) painting and decorating each room.  To date we only have the living room completely painted and decorated and now my youngest daughter's room (what can I say, we're a little slow at this process I take too long to make up my mind).

Here is the progress from pre-move in until yesterday when we finally got it done!

This was taken about a month after going under contract

 

Taping Done

Painting done, still need trim & doors

Almost Done!

I almost have the house back to the normal pre-holiday chaos state - yeah!  The last thing to do is label all of the Christmas totes and have The MAN pack them all down to the garage!  

Right now the house is definitely a work in progress (which is why I am taking a computer break).  

Will post the "After" photos once it's done!

Whose Idea Was It To Sort Through The Christmas Stuff?

Oh ya, it was mine. 

What was I thinking, my house looks like a Christmas Bomb went off!

I think I am suffering from Piles Disease, specifically Christmas Piles Disease.  Don't come too close or you might catch it!

It seems like I am always trying to get organized, "trying" being the key word here....I think everything in my life is a work in progress!  However, the "progress" part of things usually has a middle result of an even bigger mess than when I started....

Shhh, don't tell my husband, but I told him that everyone has a mess like this when they are trying to organize - they do don't they?  I am of the firm belief that I am just like most wives and moms, but I don't try to sugarcoat anything, I normally tell it like it is and if it sheds a bad light on me, then so be it. 

My house is a mess, there I've said it, but it will look better before the end of the day (I hope).

Emergency Plans

One of my favorite Facebook sites is "Hope for the Best but Prepare for the Worst". So in keeping with that, the following emergency documents (.pdf version) are available to download, save, print and most important ~ USE! Thank you to my local emergency management agency for providing these.

These are based upon completing one each month so that within one year's time you will have a complete action plan in place, however for myself I plan on doing these as fast as I can so that they are complete and in place (I don't want to wait a year to be ready). 

Also, since I cannot pass up a marketing opportunity....I know The Gourmet Cupboard mixes will fit right in when assembling the 72 hour kit, many of the mixes are "just add water" so they will be perfect as emergency rations.  The dry food mixes have a shelf life of 6 months to one year, so I will just mark the kit with an expiration date about a week before it actually expires.  Once that date rolls around I will pull out the mixes and replace with new.  Then we'll just use the mixes that are about to expire for family meals (no waste).