Organization... A Month-long Event

Apparently I was on an organizational kick last month and it has been wonderful! My house feels so much better!

In addition to organizing the things in my last post, I tackled a few other key areas that have been nagging at me.

I did find the perfect slide out drawers at Bed, Bath & Beyond for our knee-wall cabinet in the upstairs bathroom and organized everything in there. Luckily because I had organized things into baskets last year, there wasn't that much "extra" or expired stuff.

The hall closet was a breeze because after Hurricane Sandy, we pulled out all of our extra coats, shoes, and boots and donated them to the relief efforts. So that was just a matter of installing a shelf to hold the remaining boots and shoes and adding drawers to the top shelf to hold all of the mitten, hats and gloves. Easy as pie!

We are also in the process of returning my home office to partial use as a small guest bedroom. In doing so we moved the huge bookshelf from there down to the guest room which provided the perfect opportunity to cull, organize, and review our entire book collection. My husband chipped in (about one third of the collection is his) and after hours of sorting, cleaning, and re-jigging the shelves, we have we realized that we need some additional shelves to hold the remaining items... As it turns out... there are three more big boxes of books in the basement.

So we embarked on one of our favorite pastimes yesterday... We went to New Bedford and visited the architectural salvage looking for either shelves or the materials to build shelves. Unfortunately they didn't have anything to fit the bill (and the one item we found was ridiculously over-priced) so we left empty-handed and went "junk-tiquing". There are several "antique" stores in NB and we enjoy making the rounds looking for items of interest. Sometimes it's a hit and sometimes it's a miss.

After several hours of wandering through four shops (and my danged work phone ringing a dozen times at least), we came home empty-handed. Well... Not entirely. We did stop at the fish market where I bought a pound each of scallops and shrimp pretty much right off the boat for $13 total (that would have cost me about $30 on the Cape).

So we came home without a bookshelf but with greater enthusiasm to build one from scrap lumber. I was planning to go out and harvest some wood from the pallets I saved from the patio project but I woke up to snow... So I'm going back to bed! There will be plenty of time for projects later today and tomorrow as my husband is working double doubles.