The next step in my office/scrapbooking organization was to deal with the office supplies. There are more than I would have thought!  At the beginning of this quest of order, the office supplies started out in piles in front of and in the bookcase (lower right).

The Solution was a totally ineffective bookcase hidden behind my husband’s desk. You can see it peeking out there, but what you don’t see is that the shelves that aren’t visible are relatively empty!

With a little rearranging in February, we moved the shelves out where we could use them and moved the office supplies – which by this time had migrated to a huge pile on the right side of my desk (not pictured) – haphazardly onto the shelves so I could work on that lamp issue.

I finally sorted the boxes out and finished organizing them. I also put labels on!

It would be lovely if I could leave the shelves like this (sans my helper):

But, we have too much stuff, so I had to use the wasted space over the boxes, but it’s still a HUGE improvement!!  Yay!

I have to give up my illusions here…

I don’t like to cook.  Sometimes I fantasize that I will become passionate about cooking, so I look at recipes and cookbooks, but I don’t. And so I collect books and recipes on cards and from magazines and I never do anything with them.  I found three recipe card boxes. One had a bunch of Martha Stewart recipe cards that I never used. Another is empty. The third had all the random recipes I DO use crammed in it. Since I am a techy girl, I am abandoning the cards.

I spent the weekend transcribing (or finding online) all of the recipes I would like to someday make and saving them in the recipe app I am using (My Recipes). There are pros and cons to it, of course.  I like that I can tag and sort, make grocery lists, change proportions, but especially that it saves the recipes in my DropBox. It doesn’t let you easily track nutrition information or plan meals and calculate meal nutrition info, but the developer is pretty responsive so it may be a feature someday. Also, it is kind of a pain to add ingredients one at a time – I’d love to be able to just copy/paste from a text file, but that’s pretty unreasonable to expect.

ANYWAY – I am all done! Here’s the stack I recycled:

There were a few that I wanted to keep because my mom or grandma wrote them, so for now I have put them in plastic sleeves in my Household Notebook in the Meal Planning section.

And here’s the reveal of yet another project: The Family CookBook.  We’ve already made a PDF of the original one (113 pages of recipes, photos, and illustrations), but I’d also like to have them in My Recipes or at least a searchable index available. And then we need a new and updated one! It would be nice to have all the old and new recipes available online when I’m done with it, too.

But, I will save that for another day!!  O.o

Remember this tea tin?

I didn’t like how things were organized inside:

It’s pretty haphazard in there and you have to pull things out and cram them back in there.  I also decided it was too big on my counter, so I made a new one.  I painted a Christmas cookie tin and tried to use a stencil and then cut-out tape to paint the word on it, but I had to sand and repaint twice and finally just had to do it by hand. I printed the word “Tea” on some paper, cut it out and then traced around it with pencil on the lid. Then hand painted it.  The paint job is not that great. Don’t look too closely…

I used a cereal box to make the dividers and covered that with scrapbook paper.

It even fits on the ledge out of the way! Nice!

Remember my adventure in going through my files? I had alluded to my manuals in a post about my household notebook where I made a tab for them.  Well, while going through my files, I found so many I had to put them all into their own notebook.  Well … I don’t like the notebook.  The manuals are often too big and bulky for the page protectors I used.  Also, I have a whole bunch of them! And finally, I am rarely going to look at any of them, ever.  SO. I went through the notebook and found all the manuals in pdf format on the internet.  There were only a few that I couldn’t find on the manufacturer’s website, but a short email to their customer service quickly resolved that. The pile on the right are the manuals that are being recycled. On the left are the five manuals that are being kept. And they now fit in the Household Notebook! Yay!

I got to start a little on the Spring Cleaning/Organizing of the Kitchen. I went through all the cupboards and culled what I could and I found new homes for things that don’t belong in the kitchen. I asked my husband to resolve all the items in the “to return” basket which he did and he went through his stuff that accumulated in his adopted corner of the counter. It’s not done enough to share, but one thing I did get done was cleaning and organizing under the sink! Yay!

I forgot the before photo again, but here is the cupboard empty of things:

All the stuff under there went on the counter for sorting:

Here’s what will go back in after it’s cleaned:

I cut a hole in the lid of this plastic container and stuffed all the plastic bags into it:

I used Command hooks to hang our gloves (after they’ve dried) and put the dish washing supplies in neatly:

And then I put the cleaned plastic bag holder, garbage can, and recycling bins back in:

I debated about trying to label things, or put them into matching containers, but I decided that I usually don’t keep a lot down there. And the only things that get out of hand down there are bags and sponges and they both seem well corralled now. I would like matching and labeled trash/recycling containers, but I have no budget for those types of things right now. Maybe I’ll take a Sharpie to them! And the plastic bag container needs some love, to…