Organizing My Life-Flour Drawer (before and after)

Continuing with my "re/organizing my home in my spare time" theme, I now take you to my "flour drawer." I have an old antique hutch-a sort of 'hoosier cabinet' that came from my parents. They bought it when I was a teenager and I claimed it would one day be passed down to me. :) I have always loved this piece of furniture, and here in our rental, it came in handy, as there is not much cabinet space.

One thing I use this piece for is my flour(s). Since being diagnosed with a gluten intolerance, my flour numbers have gone up! I used to have a few blends, now I have..like...127. (or so it seems) Til now, my best organization has been ziploc bags...as you can see below, that wasn't working for me. When I'd go to bake and need a certain type of flour, I had to lift out every bag, and then see if I could read the bag label (due to flour leaking out of said bag inside ziploc bag). It was time for a change...

Some ball mason jars, a label maker-that I love, and just about a half hour later, and ta-da!!! (bottom layer of drawer)

Final shot of my drawer below. (I ran out of big enough jars for a few large bags of flour) Did I already say I love my label maker? I told a friend today that I'm having to keep my self from labeling everything...you know "salt, pepper, dresser, cabinet." :) But, I love how I can see, for the most part, which flour is which just at a glance. Ahhh...that job felt good!

Organizing My Life-Cash Envelope System (before and after)

One of the things I love is taking out cash each paycheck. It keeps me on budget...or should I say closer to my budget. There are some areas (like groceries), I cannot seem to stick to some weeks. I'm trying! I have used cash off and on for years, and just find that I do better when I have cash in hand-it hurts more to give it away, I know how much I have-so I make better choices, and I can say no easier.

A year or so ago, my sister gave me her Financial Peace envelopes/holder. I was excited, as I had always used various white regular envelopes filled with money, stashed in my wallet. This was a nice way to keep them all organized and held together. But, as you can see from my pictures, they wore out on me!

So, I found This Tutorial and made some new ones-during the football game the other day I "watched" with Shane (some guy named Tim Tebow was playing??) :) , and I LOVE them! They are fun and bright and might make saving money seem a little more exciting?? I don't know-maybe that's a stretch. :)


But, they are so sturdy-made out of cardstock, and I made several more "categories" to help me keep even better track of things.

My new categories are: Fun (entertainment-which usually consists of eating out once every two weeks-:) ), Haircuts (includes Beauty/Cosmetics), Date Night (currently has $1 in it!), Grocery-Bulk Foods, Grocery-milk/eggs/dairy, Grocery-bulk meat, Grocery-produce, Grocery-Misc., Grocery-Meat, Household Misc., School, Clothing, and Gifts. Now, these are just my "cash" categories, we budget the rest on paper. The lady who designed these, also sells them on Etsy pre-made here, and they are laminated! I'm sure they'd hold up for awhile! I'll let you know how long these last.

Organizing My Life-Back Room "Pantry" (after)

So, this is a follow-up to the earlier post on my back room "pantry." Here are the AFTER photos!! Now, my husband could not tell I had done anything! ha! Very observant. However, I feel like a new woman! I added two shelves that had been sitting there waiting to be added for, oh, 8 months now. :) In my reorganizing, I cleaned the shelves and I realized I had a few things I had forgotten about..or couldn't find. Myra was also excited that she could actually see what we had. I did realize that I DO NOT need any barbecue sauce, tomato sauce, or pepperocinis for awhile. :) But, it's so nice to be organized..now when I hit my "salvage stores" I know what I need to stock up on, instead of guessing. :)

However, when I was pulling these pictures off of my camera, I saw that I had moved some olives and sauerkraut on a shelf when I was organizing, and had not put them in the right spot. So, for those of you that are OCD..not mentioning names...I did put them on the right shelf AFTER the photo was taken. No need to worry! :) And, for those of you also OCD, you do not see the laundry pile in the background..and if you do, and you're my friend, you know it's a lost cause with me anyways. I will never catch up with laundry. I'm done pretending. :)

Organizing My Life-Back Room "Pantry" (before)

Well, last post I told you that I had some life changes coming up that I'd talk about later. I am now in a new season of life. After much prayer, and lots of tears, and more prayer, we decided to send our two girls to school for the first time ever. We have homeschooled since my oldest was in preschool. This was a HUGE decision for us, one that did not come easy. Long story short, I just hit a "wall." Each day was hard to face, and I felt like I needed a break...but was willing to press on, if that's what God wanted. God gave my husband and I the peace to let go for this time in our lives, and put them in school. And, wow! What a blessing it has already been. He has given them both Christian teachers, and just keeps confirming that He has this all in His hands.


One of my biggest fears was for my oldest to have a hard time finding good friends, and on her first day there, there was a girl from her Sunday school class, in her homeroom class! They bonded from that first day, and she has been a blessing to my daughter. What I did not know until tonight was that this young girl didn't want to come back to school after Christmas, because she had no Christian friends at school, and was having a rough time. That brought me to tears, that my daughter was as much an answer to her prayers as she was to ours. God is good!



We have felt blessed and surrounded with prayer. Our friends have been amazing-both those that homeschool and those that don't, and have covered our daughters in prayer. We are blessed with good friends. This is for this season of our lives. That's all we know. We have yet to see what God holds for next year, but for now, we feel very much He has a plan for all of this.



In the meantime, I'm getting a chance to just be "mom" again, and I have some time to get some things done that haven't gotten done in awhile. :) One of those things is organization. I do it, then let it go. My friend Kristen B., who was one of the most organized, clean people I know, told me years ago that you don't just organize and it stays that way-it's an ongoing process. Well, I tend to get things organized, then life happens. :) And, boy, does it happen fast. So, I have some time to go through things, get rid of stuff, reorganize. And, I'm posting my life for you!! I've had some encouragement lately from reading some blogs I enjoy-one of them is Keeper of the Home. It just gave me that 'push' to get to it. So, without further ado...this is my "pantry."



I say "pantry" because it's where I store food in my house. The house we're renting does not have a big kitchen, nor a pantry space, but we had some extra bookshelves..so, it's our pantry, located in a back room of our house.



As you can see from the below pictures, it wasn't out of control, there had been SOME attempt for organizing at some point...you CAN see that, right? :) However, there came a point when I had stuff and didn't have time to figure out where to put that extra can of tomatoes or that bag of chips. (after photos posted in next post)