Getting Organized, Part One...

While I'm always, to some extent, working on getting things better organized in our very active and sometimes chaotic household, I've been on a pretty good roll in making new and substantial progress and improvement in the last six months or so and I thought it might be a good thing to share some of these ideas on this blog (partly as a way of getting more actively blogging once again).

Honestly, I have to credit the beginning of this new streak with my joining of Pinterest. While some people find it a place to waste too much time dreaming of things, it hit me in just the right place and provided inspiration where I was in need of it. I actually joined Pinterest to get some ideas for how to paint our sunroom, which was both too dark (a brick red) and very worn in the paint department and had several complications - like a bunch of wood trim that had quite a bit of water damage (mostly from window condensation). Just for fun, here is a little before and after...

We managed to build up enough momentum after this tough job to tackle three more painting projects (that weren't nearly as hard as this one - painting all of that trip was a real chore, but very much worth it) - the dining room (which has been a dingy light blue ever since we moved in - it is now a rather cheery yellow), the deck (which simply needed a new coat of paint) and the "cloak room", which had a bunch of torn wallpaper. 

This cloak room turned out to be pretty interesting, again thanks to Pinterest. I found a recipe there for chalkboard paint. It was a combination of old paint and powdered tile grout, both of which we had kicking around the basement in abundance from old projects (particularly from our old house, which was a real fixer-upper and caused to become connoisseurs of "oops" paint from Home Depot). It was a messy project as I think the recipe was intended for more of a chalkboard sized area, but it came out pretty well, in spite of the fact that there was a certain amount of mixing that was contemporaneous with the actual process of painting. ;)

This was stage one of the organizing process after-joining-Pinterest. I'm even more excited about stage two because it involves the bane of my existence as a busy mom - paperwork!

P.S. I really ought to be able to find a better after picture of the sunroom. Let me see what I can do...

I couldn't find one from the same angle, but I rather like this one. :)