Tackle It Tuesday

***UPDATED BELOW***

My tackle for today is to get the entire main floor of my house organized. I know that sounds like a big job, but I've been working on it for two and a half months, and today is just the finale.

Three of the areas (my two sons' rooms and the hallway, including the coat closet and the linen closet) are totally done.

In the bathroom I need to label a few things and hang some hooks for towels. I've already been shopping this morning and I bought everyone in the family their own set of towels which includes two bath towels, one hand towel and one washcloth. Everyone has their own color so now they can use their own towels instead of always using mine. We were desperately in need of some new towels anyway, and they were on sale.

In the family room I need to organize all of the computer, phone and television cables and cords, file some papers, and set up a spot for our library books to be kept.

The kitchen will be my biggest job. I need to look through all the cupboards just to make sure nothing is out of place, hang some hooks and hang a paper towel dispenser. I am going to make a menu center, which will be a magnetic board which I can put a weekly menu on and any shopping lists we have. I need to organize the refrigerator. Our kitchen doesn't have a real pantry, so right now all of the food is in a regular cupboard. It makes it hard to get some things because they are too high. It's impossible for the kids to get things down without climbing on the counter. I have another larger cabinet that holds nothing but kitchen appliances. I have a lot of them. I am going to switch some of the smaller appliances with the food to make the food more accessible.

I will update at the end of the day if I actually get finished. I'll also post a few pictures of some of my most exciting accomplishments. I'd better go now. I've got about 25 minutes to work before I have to go pick up my daughter from preschool.



****UPDATE****
First of all, I didn't mean to make today's tackle seem bigger than it was. Organizing my entire main floor sounded like a huge job, but I've already been working on it for months, so I only had a few things left to do.

Did I finish or not? Well, sort of. As with any good project there always has to be a snag. My snag came when I switched my food and appliances around.



Here is the food cupboard before. You can see that I also have some meal preparation tools in it, such as mixing bowls, measuring cups and choppers. That is because when I'm cooking I stand right in front of that cupboard and that's the best place for all that stuff. It's not the best place for the food, though. Whenever I need anything off of the top two shelves, I have to pull a chair over to stand on.
Now here is the appliance cupboard. It is jammed full of appliances. I love appliances. Even if I only use an appliance once a year, I still want to keep it.




Now here is the food cupboard after I changed it to the appliance cupboard. I probably need to get rid of a few things. I don't need two rice cookers and I don't need three slow cookers. I think this will work out fairly well once I get rid of a few things.

Here is the former appliance cupboard which is now the food pantry. It does not work well at all. The shelves are too far apart and the cupboard is too deep. Right now I have things stacked on top of each other. I need to put in a few more shelves and I want to get some pull-out drawer organizers to put on the shelves so it's easier to get to the stuff in the back. That is going to be a project that won't be done until at least this coming weekend.

That was the main snag. Everything else went pretty smooth. I'm not posting pictures of all of my organizing goodness because I think I'll do a separate post later of each room showing the best parts, but here are a few.

I put hooks up behind the bathroom door for Mike, me and Amaya to hang our towels on, since our bedrooms are downstairs. Carson and Hayden can hang theirs on hooks in their closets since their bedrooms are just steps away from the bathroom.

Since our house is fairly small and we only have one bathroom, storage space is limited. To help with bathroom storage I put an over-the-door-pocket organizer on the back of the bathroom door. Today I made labels for each pocket so everyone will know where to put things.

Back to the kitchen (since I accidentally posted the pictures in the wrong order). Here is the menu board I put up. I know the wood isn't finished, but give me a break people, I'm in the organizing mode, not the decorating mode. When my house is organized I will go back and decorate each room, but for now the wood is going to stay unfinished. It has enough room to post a weekly menu plus a pad for shopping lists.

Another thing I did today was replace our paper towel holder. For one thing it was clear across the room from the sink because that's the only place it would fit, and for another thing, it was broken so our paper towels looked like this:

I bought a new one that could be installed right above the sink. It looks much better and will work much better.

Another thing I tackled today was to throw away these beautiful cupcakes.

They look nice but they tasted like crap. They were supposed to be Chocolate Cherry Dr. Pepper cupcakes, three of my favorite foods, but they didn't work out. Darn. I thought for sure they would be the tastiest things in the world, but it was a very big let down. I'm not sure if I'll try them again or just give up on the dream.