Do you have an older home that has no hall closet but opens instead directly into your living room? Not much fun to trip over piles of shoes when you come home, is it? That’s why this might be a great DIY solution for you. Three bookcases have been painted and screwed together to form a multi-cubby unit. If this unit is going to be placed in a kids’ room, then the alphabet picture in the center is great. But you could also remove the picture and put a flat screen TV there if the unit is for the family room or a double row of hooks for coats and backpacks if this unit will live in the front entry.

Note: I find that when you have an open shelving piece like this, large baskets that fit in each cubby are essential for stowing groups of things. Otherwise, this kind of storage unit can get cluttery looking really quickly.

You can find the three shelves at Ikea in the Billy line starting at $59.99.

Image courtesy of Pinterest.

As we head into prime vacation and travel time, it’s important to make sure our cars are clutter-free. Clutter in a car can be deadly during an accident. Here are some things to keep in mind:

1. In the event of an accident, anything not fastened down (ie. all of your clutter) could become projectiles. Do you want to see your 2 pound metal water bottle slam into your child’s head at 60 mph? I’m sure you don’t, so be sure to keep your stuff in your trunk. And maybe consider drinking out of a soft-sided, squeezable water bottle instead.

2. Don’t store things under the driver’s or passenger’s seats. The mechanism that allows the car’s airbags to deploy in an accident is located under the front seats, and if you have too much stuff there, it could damage the mechanism, stopping your airbags from deploying when you need them most. Again, put that stuff in your trunk.

3. Don’t use a car seat or booster seat that is 5 year’s old or older. The plastic in these seats breaks down in the heat of the car over time, which could mean they don’t hold up very well in the event of an accident. And if you’ve been in a car accident, replace the car seats altogether, because the plastic could have sustained tiny hairline cracks. Car/booster seats can be recycled at most Fix Auto Body shops in the Portland area, at Far West Fibers and at Legacy Emanuel Hospital.

So let’s say you are one of those people who likes to have multiple projects going on at once. And as a result, you have a bazillion pieces of papers, scribbles on sticky notes and ripped-out magazine articles to accompany each project. And let’s also say you are a highly visual person who is deathly afraid of filing. This set-up in the picture above would be PERFECT for you.

Each clipboard can represent one project that you are working on. You can clip all accompanying pieces of paper to the appropriate clipboard. If you are a student, each clipboard can represent a different class or different paper that you are researching. You can take the clipboard down and work with it on your desk or somewhere else in your house (can’t really do that when everything is stuck to a bulletin board, amIright?)

This is the perfect project/paper management system for highly visual people. Are you one of those people? If so, would this system work for you? If not, what does work for you?

Image courtesy of some genius on Pinterest.

It’s that time of year again when the kidlets empty out their desks at school, bring home all of the year’s schoolwork and artwork and leave it in a huge pile on the kitchen table. Kind of makes you want to light a match to the masterpieces and walk away, doesn’t it?

If you are not into torching your children’s schoolwork (hey, I’m not here to judge…), here’s the how-to for dealing with all of those school papers as well as some options for storing them:

Sorting through the schoolwork

1. When your children get home, ask them to sort through their papers to pick out their favorites. If your children seem to want to keep everything, set a limit of perhaps 10 papers only. Keep those.

2. Now it’s your turn to sort through what’s left. If you have a hard time deciding what to keep and what to toss, ask yourself: Is this schoolwork some of the best work little Jimmy has ever done? Is it really representative of who he was at that age? Is this a piece that will still be meaningful 20 years from now? Try to whittle the stack down to no more than 15 pieces. Trust me when I say that your grown children are not going to want to look at more than 15 pieces of their old schoolwork from each grade in 20 years.

Realize that if you start saving 15 pieces per year starting when your child is 3 and ending when he or she is 12, you will have 135 pieces of artwork/schoolwork in storage. That doesn’t include all the papers your kids will write in high school that you may want to save. So you may want to decrease the number of pieces you keep each year as your children grow older.

4. Recycle the rest of the papers. Check to see if artwork covered in glitter or paint can be recycled in your area. I know in Portland they cannot be recycled.

5. There are 3 options for the papers you are saving, some more practical than others. You can store them, display them or give them away.

Store It

1. To store them, I recommend buying a portfolio at an art supply store. This portfolio from Dick Blick in Portland costs about $8 and stores pieces up to 23″ x 31.” Get one portfolio per child and clip your child’s schoolwork together by grade. Store the portfolio under the bed, behind a dresser or inside a closet.

2. You could also buy a wide, flat plastic tub that will slide under a bed and store the artwork there. Again, clip the artwork together by grade and use one tub per child.

3. The third option for storing artwork is to file it in your filing cabinet. Make one file folder per child per grade. The downside of this suggestion is that it won’t work to store oversize pieces of artwork. If you are saving lots of things on poster board, use the portfolio method instead.

Display It

1. There are many, many ways to display your kids’ schoolwork! Check out this blog post I wrote here for 10 suggestions. You can also try Googling “display artwork” and click on the images search. The options will boggle your mind.

2. One of the easiest ways to display it is to string fishing line in horizontal lines across a blank wall. Artwork is easily attached with clips or clothespins. Ikea sells the version pictured below.

3. You could also make a digital scrapbook of your children’s creations. Take a picture or scan the artwork that you want to save. Write captions for each piece explaining what the artwork is about. Include photos of your kids throughout the year alongside their artwork if you want. Then recycle the originals.

Give It Away

1. Use oversize finger paintings to wrap small presents in.

2. Let the kids cut up their artwork and glue the pieces collage-style on to a blank card to create a custom greeting card.

3. Simply mail a few choice pieces to Grandma. Grandparents love to know what their grandkids do in school.

It’s fun to look back at your child’s schoolwork and marvel at how he or she has grown and changed over the years. But it’s not fun to look back at 500 pieces of paper after your kids have moved out, so whatever you do, stay on top of that artwork/schoolwork collection and keep only the best pieces each year.

Images courtesy of my son (top), Dick Blick (middle), Ikea (middle) and Martha Stewart (bottom).

Don’t buy this: You’re looking at future clutter here once the turtle fad dies (is that even a thing right now?) It’s a polyresin gold turtle shell meant to hang on your wall or adorn your coffee table from the Nate Berkus line at Target. It’s creepy, it’s bizarre, and it’s a $39.99 dust-catcher.

But this is pretty cool: It’s a DrinKlip Holder from the Museum of Modern Art store. You clip it on to the side of your desk to keep your coffee handy, but well away from your electronic devices. You could also put your phone there, which would be a boon to those of us who tend to lose our phones in a mountain of papers when we set it down on our desk. $22 from here.

I get asked all the time about how to keep track of all of the family’s to-do’s, their various schedules, the chores — all of those essential tasks for running a household. That’s why this DIY kitchen command center from Girl Loves Glam is so brilliant! She has separately framed a calendar, a chore list divided into daily, weekly and monthly chores; a menu list and a place for writing messages. Then she can fill out the charts or check off the lists with a DRY ERASE PEN! She added a clip for saving receipts (I get asked about that all the time too) and a cup for pens.

Now everyone in the family knows what chores need to be done, what’s for dinner, what time the soccer game is on Saturday, etc. The command center keeps track of all of this information so YOU don’t have to feel stressed out keeping it all in your brain. Thanks, Girl Loves Glam, for the genius solution!

Image courtesy of Girl Loves Glam.

So here is Step 1 to having an organized summer with children at home: Have THEM make a list of activities they can do when they are bored and post it someplace hugely OBVIOUS so it serves as a reminder that they are now living in a boredom-free, whine-free zone the rest of the summer.

Nathan has been steadily adding to this list all this past weekend. My favorite is #12 Take a nap. I’m holding up that up as a feasible option for you, young man, if I hear even the faintest of whines come from your adorable lips …

If you get your kids to make a boredom-free list for summer, send it to me and I will post it on my blog. Let’s get as many lists posted as we can, because we parents are going to need as many ideas as possible to get us through the next three months. And if you have an additional activity that Nathan could post on his list, please post it in the comments. I know he (and I) would love to get more ideas!

Okay, all you chronic magazine-article-ripper-outers, I know you are tired of having torn out pages of magazines sitting on your counters and collecting dust in massive paper piles. You read the magazines, you want to save the articles because you want to go back and read them again or because you want to try out the activity they are suggesting, but how do you organize them so you can find them again when you need them?

I confess, I am a chronic ripper and saver of articles myself — mostly gardening, kids crafts, home decor and recipe articles — and I finally found the solution to organizing them!

Get one accordion folder with a fold-over flap per magazine category (ie. one accordion folder for recipes, one for home decor ideas, etc.) and use the separate compartments inside to sub-divide your magazine articles. Be sure to put a big, ol’ label on the spine and then you can store the folder on its side (see, that’s why you need the kind with the flap) in your bookcase with your other reference books.

One mom I worked with put all of her parenting articles inside her accordion folder and then stashed it in her car so she could read it while waiting for the kids to finish up soccer practice. Another mom I worked with let each of her daughters have one for the craft and game articles they liked to rip out from magazines like “Family Fun.” Then when the girls got bored, their mom could simply tell them to Consult their Craft Folder.  I have one accordion folder to organize all of my gardening articles, subdivided by categories like perennials and annuals. I store it with my gardening reference books.

I love this idea, because it’s so simple, inexpensive and effective. Time to shop for accordion folders!

Image courtesy of Pinterest.

Several genius things about this office/craft space make me deliriously happy.

1. Crib spring as bulletin board: How many of us are trying to figure out what to do with our munchkin’s old crib now that we can’t resell them, because so many of them have been recalled? At least you can use the crib springs to hold notes, photos and scraps of paper with clothespins or small clips. So much cooler than the traditional bulletin board that starts to crumble after a few uses!

2. Kitchen graters as pen/pencil holders: Why use an ugly old mug to hold all of your writing implements when you can put them in a vintage cheese grater? Just watch your knuckles when you’re reaching for your Sharpie.

3.  Baker’s tins as sorters: For holding small office or art supplies.

4. Wall-mounted desk: I’m not sure what the desk used to be, although it definitely has an antique look. I really like how it is mounted to the wall, visually and literally taking up a smaller footprint within that room.

Are you in love with this look too? Now you have a reason to hit the antique stores!

Image courtesy of BHG via Pinterest.

My son is 7-years-old and he’s a good kid. He listens well, has a kind disposition and is pretty organized (naturally, right? Read this post about the organizing gizmo he designed when he was in preschool.) But he had one annoying habit: Every day he would come home from school and fling his backpack and coat on the floor, even though he had his own hooks at his height in the closet for those things.

At first I found myself nagging him over and over to put those things away. That never seemed to work. Months later I was still tripping over the coat in the kitchen each evening.

Then one day I told him I was going to charge him 25 cents every time he left his backpack or coat on the floor. Twenty-five cents for EACH item. Nathan was a little incredulous at first, but the very next day when he flung his stuff down on the floor, I casually told him that he now owed me two quarters. He was so shocked! But he paid up. And since then he’s been really good about putting his backpack and coat away. I think I’ve only collected 75 cents from him total.

As an epilogue to this story, I might add that last month he charged ME 25 cents when I left my coat on the back of the dining room chair after I got home from work! Boy, did he have a gleeful look on his face when he told me that. I paid up. It was only fair.

Do you struggle to get your kids to put their things away after school? What works for you? Let me know what you think of my policy.

Image of me and Nathan. Why do moms always end up holding all the coats and bags whenever we go somewhere?