Fruit Basket Organization

I started off this year with lots of good intentions {aka New Years Resolutions}. I wanted to get my house organized, and I wanted myself and my family to start eating more healthy foods. It can sometimes be really easy to plan these kind of things...but the follow through is often really difficult! One of the first places that I wanted to start my organizing was the kitchen, specifically our fruit bowl! For years we kept a medium sized bowl on our counter where all of our various fruits mingled together. The bowl worked pretty good for the first few years when the boys were really little and it was mostly Jason and I eating fruit {other than the enormous amount of bananas that the boys ate when they were babies}. But as the boys got bigger they started eating WAY more fruit which meant our fruit supply started to outgrow the bowl. Plus Jason hated that the bowl took up half of the island, and I hated that when the bananas and apples hung out together the bananas always got brown faster!

I considered a few different ways to organize our fruit. I had seen a cute under cabinet storage idea on Pinterest, and I even thought about those retro hanging wire fruit baskets. But neither of those really worked with our space. I came across these baskets one day as I was browsing the aisles of Target, and I knew they would be perfect for holding our fruit!

I picked up three baskets, brought them home, and got Jason to figure out a way to hang them on the side of the cabinet {these are actually meant to be stacked up, but they work perfectly hanging too as long as you can rig up a way for them to hang because they don't come with hanging hardware}. I love that I took a basically wasted space and added storage to it. Our fruit baskets also look great right across from the boys Magnet Board that I added to the end of one of our cabinets a few years ago too.

So far the new baskets are working perfectly! Our counter tops are clear of fruit {though I can't say the same about dirty dishes and various papers}, and the different fruits don't have to mingle and make each other go bad too soon! 

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HGTV.com feature

A few weeks ago,  I got an email from a writer for HGTV.com asking if they could feature my Outdoor Toy Organizer in an article on the HGTV.com website.

To say that I was excited would be a major understatement!
I love watching HGTV and I love browsing HGTV.com for awesome ideas....so knowing that one of my projects would be featured there was such an honor. I got an email today saying that the article was up and I was so excited that I just had to share it here with y'all! The article is called Clever Uses for Everyday Items in the Garage. I know my original project was for outdoors, but honestly it would work even better inside a garage! Here's a little preview of what the article is about straight from HGTV.com:

Upcycled decor is smart and savvy, so why save all the best ideas for inside the home? We've gathered clever redos from inspired DIYers with a talent for giving new life to old things that are perfect for the garage.

I would love for you to hope over to HGTV.com and check out the article. I know you have all seen my Outdoor Toy Organizer before, but there are also a ton of other great ideas that are perfect for organizing your garage or outdoor space...just in time for spring cleaning too! 

Organizing the Laundry

I know I'm not the only mom who despises laundry. I think between the monotony of folding and the fact that it's a never ending cycle of clean & dirty, most moms would love to have someone else take care of the laundry for their family! But like me, just because you hate to do it doesn't mean you can get way with not doing it! Sure if you're J. Lo or someotheroverpaidfamouspersonwhoneverhastodotheirownlaundry the laundry probably seems like a joy...drop it off and it comes back clean and folded and you didn't have to do any of the work! But in my house laundry is work, and the best way to make work easier is to be organized.

We've had the dirty clothes part organized for a while thanks to this lovely creation that I bought at Walmart a few years ago.

 My organizational issues with laundry start after the clean clothes come out of the dryer. We have spent the last few years with just two laundry baskets. You can do the math and probably figure out that two laundry baskets for five people just doesn't work very well. And most of the time the clean clothes end up piled on the couch {and the chair} kind of like this...except this is a much smaller pile than normal:)

 So I decided it was time to get my clean clothes organized by simply buying a few new laundry baskets. My original intentions were to find some fun colored baskets {ideally in blue, green, and orange to continue our tradition of color coding}, but Walmart and Target didn't seem to get the memo and only had either black or white baskets. I decided on black mostly because they seemed a little more sturdy, but also because they seemed a little more formal too...you know just in case I wanted to leave them sitting around full of laundry when we have guests over!

 Now I had three identical black baskets, and I knew that would be an issue. It is is a lot harder for my kiddos to find their clean {wrinkled} clothes if they don't know which basket is theirs. My simple solution was to cut a few pieces of ribbon {blue, green, and orange} and tie them to the handles of the laundry baskets. Now everyone knows which basket is theirs without digging through a basket for 10 minutes while looking for clean underwear!

Do you have any simple solutions for making the dreaded task of laundry easier? Please share them with me....I need all the help I can get when it comes to the laundry!