Kitchen switch-a-roo

Today I completely switched around my kitchen, also known as "driving my husband completely banana's". Chris HATES change and complains about it incessantly. However, the next time I change it around he'll complain that he wants it back the way before - which he also complained about.

My kitchen appears to have a bit of cabinet space, but it's an illusion. The cabinets are shaped funky, there are weird dividers that make it difficult to store things effectively, and we just seem to have never enough space. I hate things on my counter, so even the toaster is stored in a cabinet (this habit I picked up from my mother-in-law!). The only thing allowed on my counter is Betsy, my new mixer. Ain't she beautiful!

Anyway, Chris was flying late tonight and most of the times this means an easy going evening. Chris is leaving soonish for 5+ months and so we are now transitioning back into "getting on with life when Daddy is gone" phase. We've been very lucky for the past 3 years Chris has been on a special duty assignment that has kept him from deploying and in the past year hasn't even gone on a TDY because of my surgeries but thats all about to change. He'll be back to being gone 6-9 months out of the year soon and so we are preparing for that.

My plan is to accent my kitchen and dining area with Polka Dots. I love Polka Dots! For now, I'm just cleaning it up and trying to find new space for my new gadgets. Such as this beauty I've been lusting after for a while

Chris jokes that I'm a disgrace. He bought me the iPad2 for our anniversary and I was disappointed because I wanted Betsy. After a few months I decided, with his blessing, to sell the iPad to get what I really wanted. This was also on sale for about $60 less than usual so I had to jump on it. This may deserve a name in the future. I get very sad when food spoils or gets freezer burn.

In my already cramped kitchen I had no room for all my new gadgets.

I decided to start in the dreaded tupperware cabinet. This cabinet is scary. We have so much tupperware, but we can never find anything. I swear there is a land out there where tupperware lids and socks are partying together.

See how scary it is? Also, see that annoying divider that makes it difficult to get anything LARGE into or out of that cabinet? So frustrating! I wanted to separate our tupperware from the cutting boards since we use the cutting boards very frequently and it's very hard to pull them out without a bunch of tupperware raining down with it. We have this drawer that we store the placemats and cloth napkins in

Which is the perfect size for the cutting boards, and it's located right next to the stove so it makes it very convenient. So now I had to relocate the placemats (I'm planning to buy or make some beautiful polka dot placemats!) Back when we bought our couches we also bought a coffee table that was entirely too large. We recently moved it behind the couches as more surface space in the dining room, and it has drawers and a shelf that would work for the napkins and placemats.

And now our four cutting boards are located in a much nicer spot

For our tupperware, there wasn't a single cabinet that would work well, so I was reduced to buying an additional storage unit. I am not pleased by this, and although it works well it is very bulky and ugly. I'm hoping to find a better solution, but for now this is where our tupperware is

I have yet to find "green" tupperware. If anyone knows of any please let me know!

Now I needed to move my pots and pans into my new empty tupperware cabinet. This is my awful pots and pans cabinet. It makes it very hard to pull anything out without something falling on your foot because of the weird half shelf. These poor pots and pans were gifted to Chris and I on Anthony's first Christmas by my parents. They are great pots and pans but they are nearing their life span. We are looking into upgrading to stainless steel, one pot and pan at a time as they are insanely expensive!

And this is my plates, casserole dish, bowls, and the rest of pans cabinet. Annoying.

And this is my new pots and pans cabinet in my old tupperware cabinet (Are you keeping this straight? lol).

And in my old pots and pans cabinet is where my new food saver is stored, as well as Betsy's attachments!

Thats my extra mixing bowl, my ice cream maker attachment and my bin of other attachments. On the top, weird half shelf perfectly fits my food saver and storage bags. The ice cream maker can and should be stored in the freezer, so this is the picture after I realized that

Now I need something to fill that gap!

I forgot to take a picture of my cup cabinet prior to emptying it out, but I thought it would be best to put the cups over where the plates and bowls were now that I took out most of the pans.

We have more plates and bowls than that, they were all in the dishwasher.

I needed to move the cleaners from their lower cabinet because Charlie kept getting into it. So they went into the old cup cabinet.

Here is Anastasia taking the cleaner out and handing it to me to put up top.

This is another weirdly shaped cabinet. It goes way towards the back but it makes it hard to get to the stuff back there without practically climbing into the cabinet.

Cleaners are one of my few non-"green" things, my OCD makes it hard for me to trust that something is clean without harsh cleaners. I'm working on it.

Here they are crammed in the new cabinet. This had three shelves in it, but I had to remove one and change the height of the other one in order to fit anything into it. The shelves, prior, could hardly fit anything that was remotely tall. See my inventory sheet? (My computer just turned off and I thought I lost this post! I was about to throw my hands up and laugh/cry).

I forgot to take a picture of the after cleaner cabinet. It now stores the huge pots I couldn't get past the weird divider, and the kids cups. It drives me crazy to hear 20 times a day times 3 kids "Can I have a cup!" so I thought it would be the most logical thing to put the kids cups where the kids can reach them. I now fear I will be washing every kids cup every single day, but at least they can reach them.

Around this time we had a mini-family crisis and the rest of the kitchen switch-a-roo had to be put on hold. Hopefully I'll find time soon to finish it. I only have a few more cabinets to go through.

So far I've made muffins, tortillas, and pancakes with Betsy. The pancakes were for dinner tonight, and they were super simple to make and much less messy than usual.

These are some pictures of the Bear eating pancakes. We've had such a hard time getting him to eat that I was so happy he ate some pancake! He is nursing about 18 hours a day at the moment, and it's driving me bananas. Hopefully he'll be able to eat more food soon!

I got my Mixer!

For years I have been lusting after a KitchenAid Mixer. I tried, for a long time, to be as self sufficient as possible. Then I was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and I had to stop doing a lot of self reliant activities - such as bread making. I loved making bread, and I was really darn good at it too! I loved making something from scratch, kneading life into it, and feeding it to my family. My arms are useless for kneading dough now, but I refused to buy a bread maker. It felt like cheating to me.

My friend Elaine brought over her KitchenAid a while back and made pizza dough in it. It was so similar to hand making it except the KitchenAid kneaded for her. I lusted after it even harder than before. With a family as large as mine, though, a 4.5 qt Mixer was not going to suffice. I needed at least a 6 qt, and a 7 qt would be even nicer. The 7 qts are so hard to come by so I settled for a 6 qt and today my lovely husband went out with the two younger kids and returned with this:

Ain't she beautiful? I've named her Betsy. All the best tools in my house have names. He bought me a few extra attachments too, and right now if you buy a mixer you can get the Ice Cream maker attachment for free! So that should be coming to me in a few weeks time!

I am so excited to make bread again and am already planning on making me tortillas tomorrow. I shall update with pictures, recipes, and results! I'm so excited!

And since he left with the two younger ones I managed to have a few hours to clean uninterrupted. My room is well on it's way to being complete!

Coupons galore! Day (lost track) of 60/300!

Today was the first day in a while that I felt well enough to do much of anything. Unfortunately, Charlie Bear didn't get the memo that we were supposed to be feeling better. He's been sick for nearly 2 weeks now, running a fever off and on. I swear it's due to those blasted shots. I wish I could convince Chris to fore go them. However, thats a post for another day :)

A while ago I asked Chris to rearrange furniture for me. He hates doing this, but he does it without too much complaint. I am a truly lucky gal!

I could have sworn I posted a picture of my desk area, but I can't find it. So this is what my desk area looked like, and what people saw when first entering my home:

This is a major work in progress. It was all neat and organized but the kids kept messing with everything and it became a disaster area. The blinds are all broken thanks to 4 kids and a dog, and will be taken down as soon as we buy some curtains. The desk is going to get a paint job - the wood will become black colored and the white grout with also be colored black. The silver filing cabinet will be spray painted white and green to match the other set of white and green drawers. The more I thought on it, though, the more I hated this being in the living room. So now our living room looks like this:

So much more welcoming, and homey! The blue recliner rocker makes for a great little reading area. A few more items await this room before it's finished. There are going to be baskets on the Entertainment Center, curtains are going to be hung (and blinds taken down), some writing is going on the wall, ect. I think it will look fantastic when it's done!

This means that my desk had to go somewhere, and since our house isn't very large there was only one place for it to go. My room. Ugh, I hate having non-bedroom stuff in there but with 4 kids it's the only place that things can go if you don't want it messed with. It has a lot of work that needs to be done, as I've been to sick to do anything. It currently looks like this

See how back logged I am with my coupons? I'm trying to organize my inserts and needed floor space to do it. However, I haven't finished and it looks ridiculous.

This weekend my goal is to get my room back in shape. I won't be able to paint the desk just yet, but it will be soon! I also plan to hang shelves and a homemade sign of some sort. Still trying to think of just what I want it to say. I was thinking, "A Day in the Life of a Freg" but we'll see.

I've been using the coupon binder method for my coupons, and I love it.

Basically I have picture inserts that are labeled alphabetically and color coded. Colors are for food, and white is for toiletries and non-food items. I love this system, it is very easy to find exactly the coupon I'm looking for. HOWEVER, and it's a BIG however, it is very time consuming to keep up with. It can easily take a few hours a week just to keep it up. So each week I fell behind and behind until I was left with the mess you just witnessed. So now I'm doing a combined method. I still use my lovely binder for loose coupons, printables, ect. But now I use the insert method for most of it.

My files are labeled with the three major coupon inserts and then there is the Misc for the various other inserts I get. Then I take each weekly inserts, staple the like pages together (I buy 2-5 papers a week), and file them in a file folder with that weeks date on it. This way when they all expire I can just tack another sticker with a new date over the last one. Then the file folders are filed in order of date. Since I use "The Grocery Game" it tells me which insert the coupon I need is in and it takes just a moment to find it. I have a mini-coupon binder I take with me into stores that has a place for each store, their coupons, the ones I end up not using, ECB's, ect. Once I am finally done organizing it I will cut my coupon clipping and organizing time from a few hours to a few minutes.

And finally... I have inspired Chris to clean and organize too. I threatened to do his office space for him and so this weekend he began on it.

It looks awful, but I assure you this is much better than it was. This is the one room of the house I refuse to clean at all and so it is very much a scary scary mess. Hopefully this is finished this weekend too!

Day - Mothers day weekend

This weekend I hit a wall. My house is a complete disaster area. My OCD ensures that if my house is a chaotic mess so is my mood. My anxiety has been through the roof, and therefore it's been hard to get up and get it done - which just makes it this never ending circle of messiness! Friday I had enough! I was so beyond stressed out and I was being the mother I swore I'd never be. So Friday evening I went out to dinner with some girlfriends and it was exactly what I needed. On Saturday we watched my best friends kids so there wasn't much in the way of cleaning that happened - although all the kids got the playroom back clean! Woohoo! And today the kids insisted I not clean at all so I insisted we get out of the house so I could stop looking at the mess. We went shopping, I bought some nice new bras (I hate bra shopping with a passion. Do you know how hard it is to find a 32G?), and then we went out to eat dinner. I made Chris rearrange some furniture first and I'm hoping to get my office corner completed here soon. I need some paint first. Pictures off all the craziness coming soon.

Day 18!

I've slowed my productivity waaaay down. I have been feeling so run down since my sunburn happened. It's actually taken a lot out of me. I've also decreased my meds quite a bit and that is making my EDS feel much worse, which doesn't inspire me to get up and clean and purge. But - I am still trucking along. One project a day. I don't think I'll stay within my "300" part of my challenge, but will definitely complete this in 60 days. Even though we are leaving in three weeks for a week long vacation!

My friend Kim suggested labeling my diaper bins with luggage tags. What an amazingly simple idea! I had never thought of using luggage tags! I will definitely keep that in mind for future label ideas. I didn't have any luggage tags, however, so I had to pull out one of my favorite home items - Meet "Lenny" my Laminator. Yes, he is so amazing he deserves a name.

Chris bought me Lenny when we were homeschooling. He has helped me create Christmas presents, games for the kids, and LABELS!

I simply used Word and their "insert a shape" option and made myself 10 labels. I even "Chrisified" them.

Chris claims he can't remember that the smallest prefolds we have are Preemie sized (they are blue), and that the smalls are green, and that the largest we own are medium prefolds and they don't have a colored stitching. So, on the labels I put the color of the stitching on them. I called my Preemie prefolds "Newborn" but its the same thing. "Blue" is for the color of stitching. These were printed on colored cardstock, printed, laminated, cut out, and I used a hole punch and tied them on with yard.

Originally I was going to have some system for shapes/colors but sometimes I really need to let things just be so the placement was pretty random. I'm quite proud of myself because of that.

Day - Get back on track!

My house was destroyed this weekend as 13 little, adorable, children ran through it for two days. I have only half-heartedly tried to get it back in shape, but today I did a good portion of it. I figured we would clean for 45 minutes and thats what we did. Amazing what a little family can accomplish in 45 minutes.

This was what my garage sale money went to

This is the new bin for my diapers. All of my diapers, minus the pile I'm giving away to friends, fit in here! I was surprised! Chris doesn't like the set up as much because he can't easily see what he wants - but I was tired of seeing the diapers spilling out all of the time. The little basket on top was given to me at Anastasia's baby shower! It holds the diaper accessories, such as snappi's, pins, diaper cream, and baby powder. I have to have everything in order. It took me a long time to figure out a way to make the colors work. There is a pattern there.

Here's Chris helping me set up for the yard sale

And my sunburned face. It got much worse after this picture was taken. My whole face blistered up. After a full day with neosporin on my face it is beginning to heal and most of the blisters popped.

MAJOR raccoon eyes! See how messy this room is? It needs a good cleaning. This room is the scariest of them all.

And this is the man who makes it all work in our house. We've been married 7 years now!

And just to show the rest of them off....

The Bear

Anastasia

Anthony

David

And.... Jovi!

Yard Sale

I know I've been slacking on posting. On Sunday, the day of the Yard Sale, I was dumb and forgetful and ended up with a wicked sunburn. The past few days have been spent feeling quite sick and trying to cool my skin. My face blistered all over, but its now beginning to heal a little bit. I'll have to post a picture of my skin soon!

The Yard Sale went well. I made about $100. I pretty much gave away a lot of things too. One lady forgot her money so I gave her a whole bin of girl clothes for free. Another couple had a baby 17 days prior. I think he was in the NICU. They wanted all three bins of boy clothes - about 6 bins worth because they were all overflowing. I told them $5. They were thrilled and that made my day more than making money. I know someone will get to wear the clothes that I have so many memories of. There was another lady whose daughter was the sweetest thing and she was very sweet too. She had just found out she was pregnant and was counting change to buy things. For about $3.50 they walked away with a bunch of baby stuff, the entire Rock Band set (game, 2 guitars, and the drumset plus 6 drumsticks - and not the cheap kind), and little house knick-knacks. Her daughter was so appreciative and stunned. Another pregnant lady bought my pack-n-play that came with all the accessories, two of my slings, and my body pillow for $20. I could have easily sold the slings online for at least $30 a piece but I'd rather make someones day than make money.

Some people took advantage of us, and they make me quite angry. I won't go into it - but they put a damper on an otherwise very nice day. What we didn't sell went to donation, and now I can get back to organizing!

Day 13 - Charlie Bears first birthday!

Exactly 365 days ago I gave birth to a beautiful, sweet, perfect baby. Charles George Mizzell (Charlie Bear) was born at 8 am, weighing 6 lbs 5.5 oz and was 19.5 inches tall. I can't believe he is a year already! His party is tomorrow and there will be pictures galore! Taken with....my new camera!!!

I nearly didn't buy it, but it calllllllled to me! So awesome pictures will be had tomorrow. Buh-bye cellphone photos!

I did a quick clean today, and probably won't get back to my hard core organizing until Monday. But I DO need help with a few things and will be posting those soon!

Day FREAK OUT!

Yes, this is why I didn't blog yesterday. I am in full freak out mode. My house is in shambles and I try to make it cleaner (why does that always happen?!?!) and I have to get it back in order for the party on Saturday while still caring for 4 kids, a husband, and a very naughty dog - one of these children is in a very much must touch mommy at all times stage, and the other three are full on destructive. So tonight I will provide you with much cuteness, and leave it at that.

I caught my middle two today doing this:

How crazy inventive, and scary, is that?!