The Internet is replete with advice on how to clean the house in an emergency when unexpected guests are on the way. It’s also full of advice on how you should “just keep your house clean” and you “won’t have to worry about these things.”

Yeah, thanks for that advice. Why didn’t I think of it?

Despite that sage wisdom, most of us have probably had that Oh-No-Second when you realize someone is on the way to visit and the house is less than presentable. While our house is neither a model home nor a complete disaster, we have kids and sometimes the house just is what it is.

Our, “Oh, no” moments have become more frequent since our oldest started driving as she is prone to telling us she’s “on the way home” with 37 of her closest friends. But, we always rise to the occasion and can implement the Fake House Plan in impressive time since we’ve had practice.

The Fake House Plan steps can vary according to the pending visitor, but it all starts in the kitchen since it tends to be the most used entrance to our house, and it goes something like this:

1. Phone call: guests on the way.
2. Run around kitchen in a circle waving arms.
3. Remove everything from counter tops and stash in nearest cardboard box. Place in laundry room.
4. Load dishwasher and clean sink (scars from Fly Lady).
5. Remove papers etc. from front of fridge and say bad words because you’ve told everyone to stop putting stuff there, it goes on the side.
6. Find strongest smelling cleaner under sink and wipe counter tops.
7. Check time and walk in circles around kitchen again, decide to sweep the floor.
8. Proceed to bathroom.
9. Put linen closet door back on track, close shower curtain, and throw some Comet in the toilet and swish it around.
10. Dismantle fort and put couch cushions back on couch and pick up gross particulate matter from the floor.
11. Spray the poor coffee table with furniture polish in a can.
12. DVDs, game discs and boxes all in no particular order swiftly placed in entertainment center.
13. Spray smell-good stuff on door frames in hopes that people think the house must be clean if it smells good.
14. Clean miscellania off stairs and vow never to put anything on the stairs ever again as long as we live.
15. Take rest of house and shove it in guest room and dash to kitchen table and sit casually as if we’ve just been there chatting when guests walk in.

Oh, look who’s here! Come on in, we’ve just been sitting here reading the paper…

How about you? Share your Fake House tips or tell us the most outrageous thing you’ve done to get the house in order quickly.

Like many families, our kitchen is our command center for schedules and documents.  We have 3 kids in 2 schools, 4 sports teams and various camps. Combine that with life in general, and it can make for an avalanche of “important stuff”.

We’ve tried many organizational tools over the years (there are so many great ones available), but we usually revert back to what works for us even though it’s not very fancy. Perhaps I should even be embarrassed by this “system”, but it’s just what we do.

For us, folders, holders and books for current, “active” papers, schedules etc. tend to make them “out of sight, out of mind”, so we don’t have much luck with them. Now that I’m writing all this down, though, it seems we use the “appliance method” of organization.

As far as schedules go, our weekly and monthly calendars are on the side of the refrigerator. The monthly calendar is a standard paper one, and I write in the recurring events such as sports practices and all the other known activities.

Every Sunday morning, I write the schedule for the week on the white board next to the monthly calendar. We go over it on Sunday nights as a family to make sure everyone knows what’s going on for the week and to ensure we haven’t left anything out:

Important, “active” paperwork (as opposed to things that need to be filed away) is kept on top of the microwave (yeah, I know). I’m not sure how that started, but everyone treats it with proper reverence and knows things you don’t want to lose go there, so that’s where it stays:

Finally, those reminders and papers that are critical for the day, the ones that absolutely can’t be forgotten, go on top of the coffee maker:

While that may not be the most conventional place to keep vital information, if you think about it, it makes sense. The kids won’t touch it, and there’s no way we could forget to look at it in the mornings.

So, that’s how we keep ourselves going. What about you? Tell me about your family command center, where do you keep all your “important papers”?

I have 3 kids in 4 different sports, and have had more than that (sports, not kids) over the years, so we have more than our fair share of sports “stuff” around the house.  In order to keep the sports miscellania from literally being “around the house”, I’ve had to develop a system.

Now, I’m not saying it’s a life-changing system, but it works for us for the most part. I’d love to say that we just fold uniforms and put them away neatly in their rooms with the rest of their clothes, but as many of you know, it doesn’t always work that way.

When my older kids were young, if changing clothes once a day was good, changing clothes 8 times a day was better. They didn’t discriminate between play clothes, church clothes, bathing suits, costumes or soccer uniforms, all was fair game in “change your clothes roulette”, and that made for some interesting searches the night before the game, so I have a “thing” about wanting to know where the uniforms are.

The older 2 kids take care of their own uniforms for the most part, but our youngest, age 9, plays several sports and has quite a few uniform and practice things to keep in order. We use an inexpensive baker’s rack to organize all of it. The keeps things easily accessible, but the the shelves help maintain a system.

The top shelf is uniforms and associated accessories ONLY for whatever sport is in season. This shelf is “sacred”, and he knows not to get things from there unless there is a game, because he’s prone to wearing his uniforms all the time if left to his own devices.

The next shelf is cold weather clothing that’s obviously not used in summer, but he does have the occasional need for warm-up pants or a sweatshirt in a cold gym. The third shelf is a basket full of string tote bags since bags (and water bottles) seem to be disposable around here.

The bottom shelf is a round laundry basket that contains the “other” stuff for whatever sport is in season. Since soccer is getting ready to start back, it holds items such as practice clothing, spare shin guards and cleats and a ball pump. It used to be able to hold a ball, but as you can see on the right of the rack, the red bag holds his ever-growing collection of soccer balls.

We have multiple round laundry baskets, one for each sport, that we store on the top shelf of the laundry room, and we just change out the basket and uniform items on the baker’s rack with the sport season.

For example, when soccer is over, it will all go back into the soccer basket, and it gets changed out with the basketball basket, and those uniforms go on the top shelf, etc.

For us, it’s important that the baskets are different from our regular laundry baskets, so they don’t get sucked into the laundry abyss.

Even if you don’t share my driving need to know where the uniforms are at all times, how do you keep all the sports items in order?

Oh internet, the things I do for you. These are photos of my cabinets. I did no cleaning before taking these, obviously.

A few months ago we finally finished installing the cabinets in our mudroom/laundryroom. I couldn’t imagine at the time how I was going to fill all that glorious space. But it is true what people say, the more space you have the more you fill it.

Slowly things just started getting placed into there. Don’t know where to put something? Hey, just stick it in the empty cabinets.

And that is just what we did. With wild abandon. I want to cry every time I open them. And not just because heavy things fall out and hit me on the head.
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Alternate Title: This week is kicking my butt and I haven’t finished this project yet!

This is one of those weeks where my mantra is: “What needs to get done, will get done. Everything else will get done eventually.”

Remember last week I shared the horror that is my gift wrap situation? I loved your input on that post and was particularly inspired by the old dresser as gift wrap station. I have the perfect dresser to use even.

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I’m back on another organizing jag. Do you ever feel like the world is set up to drown you in papers? I spend at least one hour of my day browsing papers, some junk, some from school. If I ease up at all, by the end of the day I am behind and my kitchen and dining room are covered in various papers. It’s just me isn’t it?

Funny enough this has very little to do with my post today. Today I thought I’d share a couple organizing ideas which have inspired me in the last week.
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Do you have a house cleaning help? I do not, but wish I did. After crunching numbers and facing down orthodontic work for both kids, I think it’ll be a while before we can get someone to help. It’s not that I can’t do it myself, my house isn’t all that large, but there are two issues which keep me unhappily cleaning.

I hate that the entire house is never clean at the same time, with the time I’m willing to devote to house cleaning, I have time to do all the bathrooms or all the main level or all the upper level. I’m rarely able to commit a whole day to cleaning the entire house.
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The last time we spoke about the office in my basement I was trying not to kill my husband because he has 4 boxes full of model cars. This, in addition to the 10 or so he already has displayed in the room.

But since he’s out of town this week I’m not trying to keep my hands to myself this week. Instead I’m making progress on the office. The nice thing about the space we’re creating is that I have one wall to myself. My chair faces my wall so instead of staring at my husband’s clutter, I can find serenity in my things.

I spent the day yesterday putting up shelving above my ‘desk’ which is just a hand me down breakfast room table. I put these shelves up by myself. I’ll report back if they come crashing to the ground in a week or so.

It’s certainly nothing terribly impressive, I’d like a new desk, a lamp and a comfortable chair, but sitting down with my things within easy reach has been amazing. Anywhere you can create a work space for yourself I highly recommend it.

Since getting the basement closer to order, I’ve been thinking about how to keep my family organized. Honestly, I had it together fairly well with one child in 3rd grade and the other just in kindergarten. Now that they’re both in school full time the universe has spun around and I am riding a wave of panic that I’m not going to be able to keep up. I’m going under the wave of paperwork and activities if I don’t keep paddling.

That’s why this article about creating a central command station for your family at Real Simple came at a very good time.

From the article:

“When paperwork comes into the house, read it and route it. Attack — don’t stack. ”

I’m getting ‘Attack Don’t Stack’ tattooed on my forehead. Because that is exactly how I process our mail and the contents of our kid’s backpacks. I devour paperwork.

They recommend these wall boxes in the article and I’m debating picking some up. I just wish they were more attractive so I could keep them in my kitchen. Each family member gets a box in the Real Simple way but I think we’ll do a box just for each child. I’m afraid if my husband gets an inbox it will be full of items which will never see the light of day again.

This article recommends having a ‘Master Calendar’ for the family where everyone writes their appointments and schedule.

I use my computer’s calendar feature to track birthdays and any appointments I happen to make while I’m on the computer. Otherwise everything goes on an old fashioned calendar inside a kitchen cabinet door.

The only thing lacking in this system is my family’s investment in the daily schedule. I am pretty much the only person who checks the calendar. Mostly because I am the only person with a driver’s license and/or the person who is in the house all the time.

Generally this situation works pretty well for us, we don’t have an obscene amount of activities and since I have a flexible job we’re always able to make things work. However it does create residual resentment when my husband makes plans without thinking about what’s already on the calendar. I’m pretty sure we’d both enjoy dropping that argument.

Do you have a family calendar? How do you track your family’s schedule so everyone is on the same page?

A couple weeks ago we had a yard sale and got rid of all the stuff we moved with us from the old place and didn’t really need to. Once that sale was over I told Logan we’d move to the basement office next because, and I don’t know why, his boxes make my anger burn with the heat of a thousand suns.

The boxes are full of nonsense, things he packed at his desk at the job before the last one and hasn’t touched in over a year. These are things he doesn’t need and yet can’t part with, no matter how many times I tell him if he ever needs a single iridescent sheet of navy blue paper again in his life, I’m sure he can locate it for purchase when the need arises.

I can’t entirely explain my unending commitment to pestering my husband about his clutter issue. All I can say is I work from home and I need our home to be a place with some sense of order so I am able to function well in it. I feel overwhelmed by chaos, which is why we had two kids rather than the three we always planned on.

As we started working on the basement I spent the Friday before doing a ‘Pre-Sweep’ of the basement, consolidating boxes and tossing out as much as I could get my hands on before my husband came home and stymied me. “Oh! An issue of Runner’s World from 1995. I need that!” I also found some items I was fairly sure he’d never miss, but was still hesitant to toss or donate. They’re hiding around the house waiting for the day he says, “Where’s that fart machine I used to have?”

Here is the mess we started with, please tell me how a human being can function in this mess?

I will admit I had several boxes in this mess. I was hard on myself, that maternity sweater I started knitting eight years ago? I am never going to finish it. All those books I packed and had totally forgotten about for the last 9 months, gone. Sewing projects I started and never finished were trashed or donated and though it was hard it felt amazing. A fresh start, I never have to look at that half finished sweater again and berate myself for spending $100 on yarn and never completing the project. I never have to look at those drapery rods I never really liked but got a great deal on and feel stupid for spending money on something I didn’t love. I whittled things down and came up with four to six bags of trash.

And then a trunk full of even more things to donate to the Salvation Army, including half my clothes I’d weeded through a week ago. If you live in the Detroit Metropolitan area I highly recommend a trip to the Royal Oak Salvation Army Thrift Store in the next week or so.

Here is what we ended up with after some threats of hiring a professional organizer, tears and slamming doors.

Nothing special really, but a good place to start planning what we want the room to look like in the end of the process. Logan’s side of the office is pretty straightforward. He needs a place to keep all the stupid tiny things he likes to look at while he works. All the junk I would never in a million years want to look at in my bedroom, like vintage Vargas prints.

He also needs the typical office supplies within easy reach and we’ll have to come up with some sort of system for all the paperwork from his freelance work he collects and doesn’t know what to do with. Not only because I like a clean work area but because his clutter has an uncanny ability to navigate it’s way over to my work surface.

I am looking for a more flexible work space where I can bring my laptop to work from the basement but I also want to use my area for things like my sewing machine, stationary and the family’s gift wrap. I may also create a bill paying station down here but maybe not.

We’ll paint the walls, and since we’re leasing, we’ll hang a fabric wall to divide this space from the rest of the basement which will serve as a small hang out area for the kids once Santa relents and buys the family a video game system for Christmas. When we own we’ll build a wall and install a laminate flooring (after we live here for a year to see if and how much a problem water is). We are using most of what we have and wall shelving to keep costs down.

I’ve been collecting inspiration and ideas over the last few months and thought I’d share them here.

I’ve been spending a lot of time at Pretty Organized and the Craft Rooms pool watching what spaces real people have created. I love the wall shelves in this piece at HGTV, though I see mine having more color. These metal binder clips hung from cup hooks would be excellent for storing miscellaneous pieces of paper, especially with school stuff coming at me so fast my head is spinning. This image of a part time home office is lovely and I think the Elfa system at The Container Store is going to play into my office space design quite a bit.

We’ll be working on the basement office over the next few weeks and I’ll give updates as we complete our office.

We recently moved to a new house and in the process I was vicious in my de-cluttering efforts. First in removing toys and extra ’stuff’ preparing our house for sale and then in the packing process when it became a lot easier to throw stuff into the car headed to our local Salvation Army thrift store than to carefully pack it for the moving truck. I was so vicious I even debated just giving away all our dishes rather than bother with boxes and packing paper and bubble wrap. This is either being lazy or a serious need to rid myself of extra stuff.

Even with the heartless trashing and donating I did before the move I still found myself filling the garage with more donations once we were settling into the new place. Fairly quickly I realized I wouldn’t even be able to get all this clutter into my car for the Salvation Army. Then a neighbor announced she’d be holding a yard sale and four more neighbors said they’d join in.

At the end of the weekend I had 120 extra dollars in my pocket and room in my garage for both cars. We haven’t had a garage since the winter of 1996 so this is big news, something I would have paid someone $120 to achieve.

You can find all sorts of tips for organizing a yard sale, the simplest in my opinion can be found here, here and here. As for my particular sale, I’m not going to lie, it takes time to organize your crap stuff to sell. You have to clean everything off a bit, price everything and spend a day at least outside dealing with a lot of people you may not normally want to deal with.

Like the lady who smelled faintly of cat urine and insulted my lovely barely used candlesticks as “ugly”. I’m sure she’s lovely, but smelly, in real life. However, in the scheme of a yard sale where I’m selling candlesticks which currently retail for $40 a piece for just $8 for the pair, she wasn’t someone I’d choose to spend my Saturday with is what I’m saying.

If you donate your extra clutter through out the year and get really hard nosed with yourself for the sale you won’t have as much to organize for the sale. If you can get your friends or neighbors to participate in your sale you’ll end up having a fun afternoon.

For our sale in particular my neighbor put together a binder with dividers marking pages to track each neighbor’s sales with all the money being collected in one pot. Each person had unique tags and when an item sold the tag was put on their specific sales page with what the item was for our personal information. I thought this was an incredibly effective method and one I wouldn’t have thought of.

Another neighbor set up my daughter and her oldest daughter at a table with lemonade and cookies. This is something in our old neighborhood my daughter was dying to do and I refused to allow because of the registered sex offender (victim under 15! Wooo!) two doors down. Their sale netted $12 in non sex offender dollars.

My daughter decided she’d like to sell a few items herself to save up for yet another stuffed animal. Stuffed animals drive me so crazy my head explodes, they reproduce using the contents of my brain as stuffing. I swear this is true. Using another neighbor’s tip I told her she could buy another stuffed animal with the money from her sale, as long as she put stuffed animals in the sale.

To weed through them (and cut their numbers in half) we pulled them all out and did a one for one sort, one for sale and one for keeps. I love this method because it truly helped her to evaluate each animal and it’s value to her. At the end of the trade off, she realized she may have been hasty putting the small bear with the “I Am Hott!” t shirt into the ‘keep’ pile, so she traded it out for one of her larger animals. We’ll use this method again in November as her birthday approaches and I may very well sit my husband down with his t shirts for a little one for one trade off.

September and the start of school is, for many families, more the start of the new year than the actual calendar new year. This is especially true for me because my birthday is in early September as well. I always feel an intense desire to get everything in order as we start the school year but this year it’s been intensified further by the move and unpacking.

Unloading all the extraneous items from our house has invigorated me for the school year. As I tossed certain knick knacks, my husband watched with terror in his eyes. “But! We’ve always had that hanging in the kitchen!” Yes, and we’ll find something we like even more to replace it.

Now we have to tackle the growing school paperwork and scheduling chaos. My daughter has been in school for the last 5 years and I thought I had a grip on it. Suddenly adding a first grader to the mix has resulted to kitchen counters and dining room tables stacked with paper.

Next week we’ll be looking for inspiration and I’ll be tackling the project as well because there has to be a better way. If there’s not the kids have to go to boarding school.