Teacher Gifts and a Link Party!

Wow, these last few weeks of May are flying by! I have so much going on with the kiddos before they get out of school. Just a few weeks ago it was teacher appreciation day. The kids always give their teachers something small to just let their teachers know they are appreciated.

I found the cute printable tags on one of my favorite blogs eighteen25! I love, love their ideas. You can find the printable here on their blog.

For the end of the year gift for the teachers I like to do a bit more to give them a BIG thank you for all that they do. Here is what I pulled together for the teachers last year.

You can find my post about it here. I got wonderful feed back from the teacher on how much they loved them. This year my boys gave me the best Mother's Day present created by my Mom. I loved them so much I decided to make them and give them to the boy's teachers.

Aren't they so stinking cute??? They were so easy to make. All you need is a pair of rain boots, rocks or gravel, dirt, and herb plant of your choice. I also added the colorful duct tape for more color but it is not easy to put on with out any kinks! My husband drilled holes in the bottom of the boots for drainage. I filled the bottom of the boots with rocks to weight them down and then filled with dirt. Planted the herb, gave it some water and attached a to/from tag to it. My son who was in preschool is finished now and his teachers absolutely loved them!

What are you giving the teachers for the last day of school? I would love to see. Feel free to link up your gifts!

Master Bathroom - Organized!

I hope everyone had a great week of getting their Master Bathroom's organized. I know I feel great getting my bathroom neat and organized. As I stated in my previous post I accidentally deleted my before pictures so I only have my big reveal pictures only. Sorry about that but lets get to it. 

I have a large bathroom but not large in storage. Our linen closet consists of some wire shelving in our closet and is something I want to work on in the future. So I have to work with what I got which is my vanity drawer, 3 drawer on the cabinet and the other half of the cabinet is open. Function was the key element for me when planning where my things would have a home. I need to have any item required to get beautiful at my finger tips. 

The first thing I do in any organizing project is empty everything out, see what I got and what I can get rid of. I then prioritize items based on needs. I find storage for like items, that serve a purpose, and are functional. 

I LOVE color so when I found this super cute liner I knew it was going in my drawers (Hubby was not interested in having his drawers lined in it - gee I wonder why?).

Now I didn't want to cover up that pretty paper so I found some clear drawer organizers and put my everyday items that I use in them.

Next I lined, and organized the 3 drawers in my cabinet. The first drawer houses my make up and contact, oh and my iphone charger (hehe!)

The second drawer holds my teeth items and some extra supplies like my razor refills, extra toothbrushes and toothpaste.

The last drawer is more of a storage drawer. I do not like lots of items on my counters so I tuck my tissues, travel make-up bags and a few smaller daily items I use.

Under my sink on the other half of the cabinet I have used bins to help me stay organized. A drawer organizer holds all my medicines and vitamins. A bin holds hair product, mouth wash, and contact solution. I thought about lining the bottom of this too but couldn't decide.....I may go back and do it :)

I maximized my height in the cabinet by using stacking bins. Most areas under the sink are hard to maximize the space because of those lovely pipes, but they have to be there so just try to find storage that will adapt to your space limits.

I love to label so as you can see the top bin holds extra hair items like rubber bands, clips, barrets, and headbands. The second bin holds all my smaller/travel size items for when we travel. The last bin holds all items required to paint up and take care of my nails! 

Bins ~ I love them. In my supply bin I keep all larger items that will not fit in my drawers. Keeping items I use on a daily basis close to the front and less frequent items or replacement items towards the back.

Many of these items I used to organized I had already and most came from dollar stores. I can't wait to see how you all organized so don't forget to link up below!

Let's Get Organized: The Master Bathroom

Are you ready??? Let's get organizing! We are going to start with the Master Bathroom. The goal is whatever you want to accomplish - organizing the whole bathroom or just a cabinet. On Friday we will post our accomplishments. Remember you can link up your blog or create a Pintrest board to link up. Can't wait to see everyone's awesome organizing ideas! Need the weekly list? You can grab it here.

I wanted to post my bathroom before pictures but I had a whoops....I accidentally deleted my pictures. Boo! So I thought I would share some inspirational ideas I saw on Pinterest.

I love the pull out drawers on this one!

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Trays are my favorite. They help to keep items where they belong in drawers that open all the time!

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I love lining the drawers with colorful paper!

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I love labels, therefore I love labeled bathrooms!!

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For those of you that share a bathroom I loved this idea.

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And one more, remember to get creative and use what you have in your house. I loved this bucket idea

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I can't wait to see what everyone did! So let's get organizing!

Getting Organized ~ A Challenge

Don't ya hate it when you see an idea and you immediately want to do it/make it/buy it?? Or you see an idea and you generate another idea from it that you can't wait to dive into??? That's me and right now I have so many ideas running around in my head. Lately I have been waking up and seeing what I "feel" like doing. I knew I needed a plan to put my idea into action.

Drum roll please........

That's right! I broke my house areas that I need to organize down into 13 sections. Each week I will be tackling a section and getting organized. I would love it if you would join me in the challenge to get our homes organized! I will be posting a before post along with some ideas of what I want to do. Then I will follow up with my finish space for all to see. If you join in please join the link party for all of us to congratulate each other on the progress we are making on getting our homes organized! You can join linking you blog post or creating a board on your Pinterest! This organization challenge will start Monday April 15 and who knows there might even be a prize at the end of the challenge *wink* *wink*

Don't forget to follow my blog, or subscribe to my blog to keep up to date with the challenge. Also like Casual Fridays on Facebook , Twitter and Pinterest to stay connected. 

You can print my list here.

Happy Organizing! 

Chalkboard Painted Herb Pot

Spring is finally here in Chicago and the flowers are starting to arrive in stores. The problem in Chicago is our weather is crazy. Right now it is 70 degrees outside but they are predicting a chance of snow on Friday! Since our weather is unpredictable in the spring I have to grow several herbs and flowers inside until the weather is more predictable. I knew I needed to start growing my basil right away. I love basil and cook with it all the time, all summer long! But I also knew it would live on my kitchen counter for awhile so I wanted a planter with style. I looked in the stores but of course any planter I liked the cost was too much for me. I had an old terra cotta pot in my storage room so I decided to give it a new look with chalkboard paint.

I then grabbed my favorite chalk pen, dirt and picked up some sweet basil seeds in the store. I wrote basil on my pot with my chalk pen so I would know what was growing in it. 

My youngest son helped me pour the dirt, dump the seeds and give it some water. Wa la ~ a cute pot of basil that can live on my kitchen counter! I love it!

Organizing the Playroom!!

 This week I worked on the playroom. My kids are the luckiest kids in the world as we finished the basement in our new house just for them. They pretty much have the run of the basement, for now. 

Clean up time can make or break us! My youngest always needed direction when cleaning up, what to pick up and where to put it. I dreamed about the day that I could say clean up time and my boys would just do it. 

Well that day has come, after some organization happened. So let's dive right in. Here is the playroom area before me moved in. A lot of space and I knew if it wasn't organize it would be a sea of toys in no time.

In comes Ikea. I love their goodies! My husband and I went there for my scraproom and the playroom. We have a lot of Legos here.....I mean a lot! My son is a Lego engineer, and is always building so I knew I wanted a space for him to store, display, and build. So we created a Lego area.

I love the Ikea piece I picked out. It has bins for all his legos, and he can display what he has built on top. My son and I separated all his Legos by color, and gave them a bin. I then label by color so the youngest can find the color, and put the right color Lego in the bins. We even have some empty bins to grow the Lego collection. The table from Ikea is nice and wide and gives both of them plenty of space to build. 

I am currently in school to become a teacher so of course I have a school area! After school, and after snack, we come down to do our homework. Each child has a bin (labeled with their name) with a pencil, dry erase marker, eraser, scissors and glue stick so we don't waste time getting our supplies out. Next to our table I have a 4 drawers that hold our supplies, markers in one, other supplies in another, paper in one, and our learning flash cards in the bottom drawer. I use clear plastic bins to hold our coloring items, and the other two hold our school workbooks. The kids seemed to pull out coloring/workbooks when they can see them. The kids get their homework done and out of the way giving them more playtime later and I fulfill my passion to teach! Even my youngest saves his preschool homework so he can do it with the big kids! 

The next area I had to conquer was the the toy area. Before we moved we had bin after bin after bin of toys! As we packed our old house I had the kids go through their toys, and pick what they were ready to give away. They did great at this! In our old house I had used one of the Ikea Expedit bookcase and laid it on it's side. I purchased baskets and all our toys went in there. It worked for us so I knew I would be using that system again. We purchased two of them, put the baskets in, and filled them with toys. Each bin contained certain toys, and I wanted the boys to put them away in the right bins. I searched the internet for a picture of the items that belong in that bin, printed it out, cut, laminated, and tied them onto the bins. The kids love it! The picture helps my youngest one know what items go in the bin and my oldest is starting to read so he love to read the tags. When we change the toys in the bin we change the tag! It also helps when our kid's friends come over! 

I also have my DIY chalkboard table. That was such a fun project and you can go here to read about it, and see my before and after pictures. The kids love to draw on the table, and their easel is near by to continue their imagination.

What's behind door number two.....storage. We kept part of the basement unfinished for storage. In here is our old Expedit and I have filled most of the bins with toys. When the boys are bored with the toys in the toy area they can just switch out the bins. The shelves hold all of our games, some larger toys too big for the bins, and the plastic bins hold toys that we can rotate into the bins when we do a toy swap.

I love how our playroom is evolving. We still have ideas that we want to put in place but my main focus was to give my children a space of their own and organize it in a way that would make it easy for the kids to take care of their space. Clean up time is no longer a struggle

 (well we have our days here and there). 

 Happy Organizing!!!

Snow Much Fun

Today the boys and I made snowman pillows, an idea I found on Pinterest. The idea was not linked for me to give credit as it was just a picture. I knew they would love them so I headed out to the stores to get the supplies. I had to guess a little as there was no supply list or instructions. This was a super cheap project! I got the pillows for $5.58 each, a set of two pillow cases for 3.58 the Santa hats for $2.99 each, I had the ribbon, and I had the foam for the eyes, nose, and buttons. So each pillow cost about $10.00. 

I had the kids put the pillow case on their pillow. Then they held the pillow up while I tied the ribbon, and their little finger helped me to double knot it! I also tied up the top of the pillow to make it look more rounded like a snowman. I used the foam sheets that have a sticky side on the back. I cut out the eyes, nose and buttons and the kids peeled the paper off and stuck them on. Lastly I safety pinned the hats on. The kids had fun and so did Mommy too!

Chalkboard Paint ~ finally got to play with it!

I tackled my first project with spray painting furniture and using chalkboard paint. I picked a piece of furniture I knew the kids were outgrowing just in case I messed up! Here is what it looked like before:

Hot Day Fun!!!

I don't know about where you live but here in IL we need some rain....badly!! With that being said the kids are dying to cool off everyday but we are trying to conserve the water and our water bill!! So thanks to Pinterest (I heart that site) I found a great idea. Water sponge balls!!! They were so easy to make. You just buy some Cello sponges (I bought the package that was 4 to a package), cut them into 4 strips, put 6 strips together (I liked using 2 different colors) and zip tie in the middle. My husband has a great little tool that cuts the zip tie so there is no sharp edge left over and it cuts it clean. I used some dollar store buckets filled with water and put one kid at one end of the yard with a bucket and sponges and the other kid at the other end of the yard with a bucket and sponges. The kids had a blast and got really wet. All we had to do was re-fill their buckets from time to time. We saved on water, money and the kids had a blast!! Thank you Pinterest!

Don't forget about those bus drivers!

I wanted to thank Nathans bus driver Kim. She is so sweet,  and always waves at me when she picks up Nate. On the school improvement days when Nathan has AM Kindergarten instead of PM Kindergarten she always makes sure he gets in the house before she pulls away. It also blew my mind that she gave Nathan goodie bags for all the holidays! I never had a bus driver do that when I was younger. So I made her a card and then found this of course on Pinterest!

There are several great printable on this site. Click here for the bus printable. Here is the card I made her. I love it! It started off with just the bus and then my mojo kicked in.

Happy Memorial Day

We have such a great weekend planned out. Tomorrow we are hanging with some great friends of ours to swim and BBQ so I made some quick buckets for the kids. Each bucket cost about $6.00 I have snaps, temporary tattoos, glow sticks, a ring pop, and a pinwheel all wrapped up in a cute bucket. Here is what I started with:

Teacher Gifts

I wanted to find something for my kids teachers that wasn't the typical thank you gift. My husband and I absolutely loved our son's teachers this year! They were wonderful and we wanted them to know it! I found this idea on Pinterest (who doesn't love that site).

So I copied the idea and modified it a bit to add my personal touch. I got most of the items at Walmart and Meijer. Each gift cost about $13.00!! I printed a little note and had the boys sign their name. Here are the supplies I started with.

 

I put it together and thought it needed something refreshing. Water maybe??

Nope....didn't like it. The water was too heavy and I could totally see my boys losing the water bottle and then trying to jam it back in and wreaking the whole gift. While in Meijer grocery shopping I saw these cute little cups....perfect! Here is the final outcome.

All three together

I am happy with the outcome and can't wait to give them to the best teachers!