5 Tips for Purging & Storing Leftover Paint

I'm really excited to be guest posting today over at The Everyday Home!  If you've never read Barb's blog, you should definitely check it out.  She shares tips and ideas for simple country living, including some organizing ideas and lots of ways to simplify life.

5 Tips for Organizing a "Real Life" Garage

Is your garage cluttered and overwhelming?  Has it become a dumping ground for anything that doesn't have a home anywhere else?

Now, be honest, do you avoid organizing your garage because you can't afford those fancy garage organizers you see on Pinterest and in magazines?

There are some mighty beautiful garages out there.  I'm happy for those people who have them.  But most of us have plain ole' ordinary garages.  Sure, we can do some things to pretty them up, but they're still not going to be magazine worthy.  But they don't need to be beautiful.  We don't live in our garages.  We store things in them.  And hopefully have space to park a vehicle in them.  If we have limited funds for organizing, more often than not we'd rather spend those dollars inside our homes, where we spend more time.

Having a "real life" garage doesn't mean it has to be unorganized though!  I've got about as ugly a garage as you can get... you'll see in the pictures.  But I do my best to keep it organized.  And I just use basic stuff to do it.

Day 30 - Garage Organizers {31 Cheap & Easy DIY Organizers}

Think you have to spend a lot of money on costly organizing tools to get your house in order?  Nope!  Getting organized doesn't have to be expensive!

Throughout this series I'm sharing ideas to help you organize your home by either

• making simple organizers with things that don't cost very much OR
• using items you already have in a different way.

If cost has been holding you back from getting organized, now you've got no more excuses!  

Garage organizers really help keep your garage, well, organized.  But they can be very expensive!  You CAN organize your garage without spending a lot of money though.  Just be creative and find items you can use to keep like items together.

Here are some DIY Organizers for your garage.

Day 27 - Shelves {31 Cheap & Easy DIY Organizers}

Think you have to spend a lot of money on costly organizing tools to get your house in order?  Nope!  Getting organized doesn't have to be expensive!

Throughout this series I'm sharing ideas to help you organize your home by either

• making simple organizers with things that don't cost very much OR
• using items you already have in a different way.

If cost has been holding you back from getting organized, now you've got no more excuses!  

Shelves are a great organizing tool.  But they can be expensive to buy.  If you want to use shelves to help you organize, but don't want to spend a lot, you can make your own shelves, often for a fraction of the cost of buying them.

Here are some ideas to get you thinking about how you can DIY shelves!

Organizing Gifts (Free Printable!)

We buy a lot of gifts.  A lot.  Parents, grandparents, siblings, nieces, nephews, cousins, our kids, our friends' kids, our kids' friends, and on and on.  It can be overwhelming to stay on top of buying all those gifts.  Not to mention the cost. 

Tips For Organizing Seasonal Items

A reader asked me for advice on storing seasonal dishes so I thought I'd write a post with some tips, while showing you how I recently reorganized my seasonal decorations and other special occasion items to keep them from becoming overwhelming.

Storage Shelves Makeover

We inherited some metal shelves in our basement when we bought this house.  The previous owners used them for canning so each of the shelves is somewhat short.  We've changed what types of items we've stored on them over the years, but their height (or lack thereof!) has always been a bit of an issue.  I like shelves that are big enough to put big bins on so I can keep lots of things organized and accessible but these are too small for those.

Currently the shelves are in the furnace room and things just kind of get crammed in there.  See??

Garage Clean Out Part 1

For the last few weeks I've been "watching" other people clean out and organize their garages through the pictures they've shared on their blogs.  It inspired me to tackle our garage so I'm joining the Great Garage Clean Out Challenge (a few weeks late but better late than never right?!).  This challenge was designed to be completed over the course of 4 weeks (and 4 blogs) but I'm catching up so I'll do this in 2 blogs.

First of all, let me say that our garage was LONG overdue for a major clean out.  The amount of stuff that gets dumped there or accumulates there makes this an overwhelming area so we keep putting it off.  But no more!  Last weekend my husband and I took on the challenge.  Here's a "before" picture of the whole garage: