Thursday, November 13, 2008

If we build it.....

...they will put their stuff away. Right?!?!


LOL...a mom can dream anyway.


We have a long hallway that has a descent sized closet and access to the garage. Since we don't have a true "mud room", I thought it would be a good idea to convert this hallway into our mud room. I am not good at making decision about buying things so, this project has taken a while to complete. But now, it is pretty much done. Yay!!


I think that I have mentioned before that I am not a naturally organized person. I try to be organized and I would really, really like to be an organized person, but it just doesn't come naturally to me. To my credit, although my own stuff is a bit messy and cluttered, I have always been pretty organized as far as the boys are concerned. If the rest of my house was as organized as their room, I would be thrilled.


Either being an organized person, or NOT, as the case may be, is an inherited trait or I am doing something really wrong. I had the boys' parent teacher conferences this week and I'll just say that the "need to be more organized" was definitely a reoccurring theme. I even took a peek in each of their desks and am quite embarrassed.

So, the whole re-do of our "mud room" did not come a day too soon. I still would like to add a few in/out bins to help with homework organization, but the rest of it is done and I think it is going to work very well.

We started out first by having Cathy paint the walls yellow. When I say yellow, I really mean really YELLOW!


I then got a bulletin board for each of the boys. Since the tan cork boards looked horrible with the yellow walls, I painted the cork, and then the laminate trim, and then I bought and painted letters for their names. I thought they turned out cute and the boys enjoy having a place to show off their best art work. We also added hooks underneath each of their bulletin boards for their backpacks. I *love* not tripping over backpacks all the time now!




Then, I added these cool calendars from Pottery Barn. I stole the idea from my friend Jeannine, who is super organized and manages to do more in a day than I do in an entire week. Thanks Jeannine! The calendars were expensive, but remember how much $$ I saved on school supplies. This was my "reward". :) Now, I'm never going to be the worst mom in the world again.


And then, last but not least, is the closet. Cathy took the doors off for us. The accordion doors on this closet served no purpose other than to pinch fingers. We also took out the old shelf. I built this new cabinet and Spencer attached the coat pole thingies. Now, everything has a place that is easy to use. Yay!!

Now, we are in a week of "training" everyone on our new system. So far, so good. Maybe we'll all become naturally organized people because of our new hallway. Wish us luck!

7 comments:

DESJ and Company said...

OMG I'm soooooo jealous.
It's fabulous.
-Sara

Cathy said...

The mud room came together very well Kelly!! Nice job!! Great ideas and love your creativity and BTW... congrats on being organized!! :) Don't you feel much better now?!?! Even Winni doesn't like it when I re-organize the house because he says that I move things around... but at least I tell him where I moved things to and sometimes he forgets.... but it will be worth it in the long run! Less clutter... clean house... and room for more stuff!! LOL!!

Anonymous said...

You are always a step ahead of me Kel, if that makes you feel any better. I have brilliant ideas , but just never execute them brilliantly---You on the other hand execute very well even if it takes you some time--it turned out awesome! I think you deserve a lunch out!

Anonymous said...

Were are in the process of reorganizing our mud room (loosely termed)/laundry room closet. I like your idea. Where did you get the cabinet "thingy"?

Michelle

Anonymous said...

Oh I forgot....what did you kind of paint did you use on the corkboards?

Michelle

Kelly said...

Hey Michelle, the cabinet thingie ;) was from Menards in the closet organization department. I like it a lot. It has a lot of different add-on options. It is also pretty easy to put together. For the cork boards, I just used leftover wall paint. I sponge painted them because I wasn't sure if they would cover evenly if I just painted them and I didn't want the paint chipping off. I did find that I had to use semi-gloss paint. For whatever reason, the flat didn't work at all. HTH.

Katie said...

Your project turned out great! I love those easy to put together closet things - I did several for our closet a month or so ago and it was fun. Now I just need to put the rest of the stuff away - I get organized in spurts. It takes energy and time - and I know you don't have a lot of time.