The holidays are a busy time, especially for Moms preparing their homes for kids winter break or out-of-town guests. Every year, I strive to make this time of year a simple and slow as possible, especially once my kids are on break from school. This year, that has meant paring down my holiday decor and keeping only the things that are simple, efficient, practical, functional & bring us joy.
{Some of my Family Room List items. All items can be found on Shopswell}
Our family room is in our basement. We use this area to watch recorded television as a family, to workout, play games & to play ping-pong. It is long overdue for some attention. The couches were given to us and are at least 15 years old. They are sagging and worn down with holes starting to form! Our TV is nice, but I know my husband is dreaming of one a bit larger. The basement family room in general has been very neglected by me and needs my cleaning, organizing and decorating touch.
{our basement that needs some updating & attention}
We have 3 girls, 12, 14 & 16. We really like to encourage them to have friends over and this space is where they like to take their friends. We decided it was time to create a comfortable and beautiful space that they would be proud of & love to bring their friends to just hang out. We also decided it needs to be done ASAP because our girls are growing older and before we know it they will be up and gone. Now is the time to invest in our living space and create the priceless memories with them before it is too late!
I started decluttering the space about a month ago. All that is left to declutter is our crazy board game shelves and our bookshelves. Many of the games on the shelves right now are for kids and our girls have outgrown them. It is time to minimalize! Todd will have to minimalize the bookshelves as most of the books on them are his.
It is a lot, and some things may need to wait as we save, but it is never too late to clean, dust, organize, dream and start shopping for what we can buy right now!
I have found the greatest site to do some organizing, dreaming and SHOPPING! It is a site called Shopswell. You all know that I love Pinterest, and Shopswell is like Pinterest for shopping! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on Pinterest, went to click on an item I’d like to buy, and the link is broken or the item is not for sale. On Shopswell you will never have that issue! They show only items that are for sale, and their price.
The site is super easy to use. You set up an account, which is where you can create and keep as many lists as you want. I, of course, made a list simply called “Family Room” because I’m a simple girl like that! You can get as creative as you want for your own lists. I am keeping items that inspire me and items that I would like to purchase for our basement family room.
I’m eager to make more lists. I made a second list called “Household” and of course, I have to have one called Wish List! There is so much that you can shop for on Shopswell. Home decor, fashion and tech are just a few of the categories. They even have food you can shop for!
You can share your lists and look at other peoples lists for more ideas and inspiration. My “Households” list was inspired by looking at others household items & their lists. If you find something on a list that you like, you can put it right on your list. They have turned shopping into a community experience.
Another feature that is very cool is their Priced Tracker. Once you add a item to a list you can then click the “track” button to add it to you Price tracker list. It will stay in your Price tracker with the current price, and can be set to alert you when its gets to the price your willing to spend on the item.
Don’t forget to enter the Shop.Share.Win. Program where you curate and create lists then share them. Each month they give $10,000 back to the Shopswell community based on credits earned for helping others. You can get the full details and rules on how to play and win HERE. You can also track the top earners, its updated every 24 hours.
I will keep you updated on our basement progress. Let me know if you create a Shopswell account so I can come follow you!
I was selected for this opportunity as a member of Clever Girls and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.
Do you find yourself pinning a bunch of great looking recipes on Pinterest, but then never get around to actually making them? Do you want an easy way to streamline menu planning each week? Then this post is for you.
I don’t know about you, but the weeks that I actually take some time to make a menu plan go so smoothly compared to when I don’t. It is a great feeling to know exactly what foods I plan on making each week, and it saves so much money in the long run, as it keeps me from quick grabbing food on the go or running to the grocery store several times a week. When I know the recipes I am going to make, and make a grocery list to make sure I have the groceries on hand, then making meals actually becomes an enjoyable process!
Pinterest is a GREAT way to not only find great recipes, but to simplify the menu planning process.
Most of the recipes I use are either on my blog or on Pinterest, and I am always wanting to try at least one or two new recipes a week. Using Pinterest for menu planning helps me to easily find and gather recipes from both sources.
I simply made a board titled Recipes To Make This Week. This is where I will gather ONLY the recipes that I plan on making that week. I then go search my own New Nostalgia board and New Nostalgia Food board. This is like my own personal recipe box. My blog is full of recipes that I love and use often, so it makes sense for me to pull from there first. I then go to my Recipes: Menu Plan board. This board is where I pin recipes that I am craving, or recipes I find that look so good that I want to make them ASAP. The last place I search for fun recipes is among all my other Recipe boards, that are sorted alphabetically according to food/cuisine type.
Once I have all of my recipes for the week gathered on my Recipes To Make This Week board, I then make a grocery list by clicking on each one and making sure I have all of the ingredients on hand. If I don’t have it, it goes right on my grocery list.
I use the Reminders list app on my iPhone, I type the list, then go check my cupboards, speaking to Siri to add anything I am missing. I also use Siri if I am out and about and remember something I need to add to my list…this is especially helpful when I’m in the car! I simply say “Reminders Grocery List” and she will then ask me what to add to that specific list, I answer, and she adds it for me.
It saves paper and I can access it on my laptop and on my phone. I usually do this while at home on my computer, but the beautiful thing about this is I can do it all on my phone while sitting in my car waiting for my kids! I can access all my Pinterest boards, and gather ingredients I need on my Reminders app. It is such a timesaver.
I do not get so detailed as to assign each day of the week its own meal and recipes. I just gather a few meals, snacks, & breakfasts, enough to get us through the week. My mood can change each day as to what I feel like eating, so I try to just have a handful of recipes that make pretty balanced week. To do this, I am purposeful to keep in mind a variety of meals.
I talk about having general recipe dinner categories during the week (fish, pasta, chicken, breakfast for dinner, meatless, one grass-fed ground beef recipe, etc) in this post if you would like to read more on that subject.
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What about you? Do you use Pinterest to menu plan? Do you have a method that works well for you? Was this post helpful?
I kept my potted plants simple and cheap this year! My energy has been down and I really didn’t want to spend a lot of money on plants. I’d rather save it for making fun summer memories with my girls!
2 Green pots of Dalias to greet my guests at the stairs by my front porch
1 Galvanized Steel Bucket holding herbs and a Mother’s Day gift from my Mother-in-Law
1 pot of my favorite funky spiral grass named Corkscrew or Juncus effusus ‘Curly Wurly’ that I plant every year. It is so easy to keep happy and I love how fun it looks.
1 pot of plain jane red geraniums (pictured above). They are the cheapest way to add color and take very little care.
1 pot of snap dragons. They were on sale and I wanted to add a pop of yellow to my backyard.
All in all, I only spent $25.00 for potted plants for both the back and front yard. Not bad, huh? They are nothing fancy, but they sure make me happy and make our little yard look thought of and taken care of.
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What did you plant this year? Do you plant the same types of flowers every year?
Laundry is just one of those things in life that will never go away. It is here to stay, so I like to look for ways to make laundry work without working harder. I have found some ways to make laundry easier, look great, and smell amazing– and THAT makes me happy! Let me share some of those ways with you:
The top picture was taken before I had my oldest 2 start doing their own laundry. As you can see, I had 3 smaller baskets where I would fold and put each child’s clothes, and they would put their own clothes away. I folded in the living room so the clothes would not sit. If they are out and about in my way, I will remember to tell the littles to put their clothes away. This system worked well when they were younger. The larger basket was for Todd and I. The medium basket held all socks. They are all quality, sturdy baskets that are pretty and fun to use.
There is nothing worse than paying for laundry detergent that does not work. If I’m going to pay for detergent, I want everything that my new favorite detergent, method, has to offer. I’ve been using method brand and have found it to be everything I need it to be. Here are a few of those things that are important to me:
PHOTO: COURTESY OF METHOD X ASOSSpeaking of design, method has collaborated with ASOS and came up with a super happy spring lineup.
These things are a pain to hang up on hangers and kids will struggle with that. If an item is used almost daily, have a hook for it.
Unless we have a new item of clothing that I know will bleed when first washed, I don’t sort. I think it is a waste of time. I like to do loads according to person, not according to color. It makes the folding and putting away so much easier when loads are according to person. I’ve never had a problem, but do this at your own risk!
I was selected for this opportunity as a member of Clever Girls and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.
This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Sauder. The opinions and text are all mine.
My Colsie is now 14 years old and it was more than time to update her room to reflect her growth both in stature and in character. She has made her Dad and I so proud in the person she is becoming. She is such a talented, fun girl, full of energy and sweetness, and it has been great to change-up her room a bit to reflect more of who she is.
When Colsie was younger, her room was all pastels and sweet. Now that she is older, it was time to make it her own and put her personality into it.
See what I mean by personality? Colsie is an amazing photographer, is learning guitar and piano and has expressed interest in learning the violin. She is very creative minded and has great taste that is very much her own. Oh how I love my cute Colsie!
Colsie made her room design pretty easy on us. For her birthday, she received a gift card to our local craft and hobby store, and this awesome and colorful bulldog painting caught her eye and she fell head over heels in love with it. She grabbed it and brought it home, immediately hanging it up on her wall. Isn’t it awesome? I love that it looks like he has been eating a bowl of blueberries. It is a quirky painting, and although my girl now rolls her eyes when I call her quirky, she really is in the greatest of ways. She is her own person and I have always loved that about her.
It is always great to take an object for color inspiration in a room and build a room around it. Whether it is a painting like the one above, a pillow, a bedspread or a rug– one object is enough to pull colors from and use them to decorate the rest of the room. This painting gave us lots of options, and we took advantage of that!
This pillow on her bed is another great example of one object that you could pull from to decorate the rest of the room. We used this RELAX pillow and her bull-dog painting to give the room a fun but relaxed personality. That is my Colsie. She is super colorful and fun, but also loves to have her chill time alone in her room.
We bought a new bed spread and added some texture with a super soft, fuzzy grey pillow. Grey is a great way to give the eye a break from all of the bright colors of the room, and add some texture, as every room can use texture for interest. Plants are a great way to add texture, weaved baskets or even frames with interest, like the one framing the mirror in the below picture. The mirror was taken from another room in the house, but was not the right color. It was boring brown and matched the brown of the dresser which was, well… boring! We painted it white, again bringing in a simple color to ground all of the other bright colors in the room. It looks great against the pale grey walls.
I still cannot believe my middle girl is a teenager, but one look at her dresser gives me a reality check. Makeup, hair straightener, perfumes and lip balms. Lots of girly things corralled in cute trays and containers for organization.
In the above picture is Colsie’s beloved guitar, which I think looks like art. I love it displayed in it’s stand, close to her bed, ready when she is to be picked up and played. If she had less windows and more wall space, her guitar would also look great hanging on the wall.
Have you noticed this great bedside table? It is from Sauder and is the first time I have ordered a piece of furniture from their company, but it certainly won’t be the last. I was super happy with how quickly it arrived. It was so easy to put together that Colsie did it by herself! It is the perfect height, size and color for her room, and I love how it offsets the turquoise of her lamp and rug. The lamp used to have a pastel polka-dot shade. We updated the shade to match her rug and it made her room look more grown up in an instant!
Sauder offers a variety of designs and styles and believes that furniture should be affordable without sacrificing style, as you will see when you check out their website. There is a ‘put//together look book‘ on their website, that shows how everyday people use their amazing furniture. Visit them and look closely as New Nostalgia is lucky to be one of their awesome features at the look book. Make sure to check it out, especially if you would like to see other ways this fun table has been used.
Sauder furniture enables you to create, enhance or complete your personal style so your home is a unique reflection of you. . It certainly helped do just that here in Colsie’s room. For more great ideas, visit Sauder’s Pinterest boards.
Colsie uses her Sauder accent table every night when lying in bed, whether to hold a drink of water or her iPod, and of course her bedside books. The top book is her photography journal, where she dreams up photo shoots and jots her ideas down.
The art piece above her bed is one of my most favorite things in her room. It has one of my favorite Proverbs on it. Proverbs 31:5 “She is clothes with strength and dignity, and can laugh without fear of the future. ” Yes, I claim this verse for our sweet Colsie and all the amazing things that her future holds.
Not pictured but across the room from her bed is a tall, white book shelf that provides extra storage for all of the stuff a teen girls needs. The above little owl is sitting on it, as is the little yellow and grey suitcase in the first picture, which holds some art supplies, and the yellow bird bank where she keeps her extra change.
Remember that it is ok to use items in unconventional ways. This little owl candle holder becomes a guitar pic holder when in my Colsie’s room.
It is ok to make the room yours and steer away from matchy-matchy. This dresser is an older mid-century modern piece. It was given to Colsie by her Aunt Kathy. It has 6 drawers and has been perfect for her room. The top two drawers hold all of Colsie’s hair accessories and jewelry… all those girly teenage things that need a home! The last 4 drawers hold her clothes. It looks great paired with our simple, modern accent table. Mixing it up brings personality to a room.
A simple string of lights above her mirror adds another element of fun that reflects Colsie’s bubbly personality, and gives the room great ambience at night.
I hope you enjoyed seeing my girls new room. I just love seeing her spend time in there and I love that she helped make it her own.
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What about you?
Where do you look for style inspiration? What is your best advice for readers in creating their own style? Have you had to take a child’s room and update it to teen status? How did it go?
This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Sauder. The opinions and text are all mine.
I was at a bookstore this weekend and was browsing through the best-sellers, and came upon this book by Marie Kondo. I was intrigued and am still thinking about the book on this Monday morning, so I decided to buy the Kindle version. I’m excited to get to reading it and hope that it will give me the bit of inspiration I need to get my spring organization into action!
Here are some things I have learned about the book from around the web:
The Konmari Method was created by Japanese organising expert Marie Kondo and is described in her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.
Kondo’s theory is that we are happiest when we are surrounded by things we love. The Konmari method consists of gathering together everything you own and then keeping only those things which ‘spark joy’. You hold every item before you decide what you want to do with it, and items that are not kept are thanked for their service, which, believe it or not, makes it easier to let things go. Key points in the Konmari method include decluttering by category and using efficient storage methods.
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up espouses a specific order of decluttering by category. You begin with clothes, then books, then papers and finally Komono, or miscellaneous items such as CDs, skincare products and electrical items. You finish up with photos and other sentimental items because they are the most difficult to part with.
Marie Kondo advocates carefully storing items so that they are well cared for and easy to find. For example, she suggests folding clothes so that sit upright in your drawers and allowing socks to rest by not rolling them up into balls.
{a short video of Marie folding an underwear drawer}
You cannot organize clutter. The first step is to get rid of everything you don’t need.
“Tidying is a special event. Don’t do it every day.” If you do the job right, once and completely, you won’t have to do it again.
“Putting things away creates the illusion that the clutter problem has been solved.” But organized clutter is still clutter.
“Tidying up by location his a fatal mistake.” Sort by category instead, in the following order: Clothes, books, papers, miscellany, and then things with sentimental value.
If it does, keep it. If it doesn’t, get rid of it. (Important documents not included, but there are fewer of these than you’d think)
Vertical storage is the key. Stacking has two problems: you can stack much more that you can store vertically (not a plus if you’re aiming for clutter-free:, and stacking is hard on the things at the bottom.
Kondo is adamant about proper folding technique, which enables you to store things standing up rater than laid flat. This method is amazing for visual types, because you can see everything at a glance, much more effectively than you can if your clothes are hanging or vertically stacked.
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I’m eager to read the book & will let you know if I use the techniques.
Does this appeal to you? Have you read the book?
For more KonMari inspiration, check out these Kon Mari Pinterest Boards.
