This is so me

As I'm sure you've heard (or read), I am a bit of an organizer. I love, love, LOVE all things tucked into their proper place. And while it's perfectly acceptable for someone to have their items alphabetized or color coded in a different manner than I, it's really all about the system.

So it should come as no shock that when we moved into my parent's house almost three weeks ago, my organizing itch was bursting to be scratched. {Disclaimer: my mom is a fabulous house keeper but when you have lived in the same residence for 21 years and have three daughters who have grown up, gone to college, gotten married and have had grand babies in all those years, you amass quite a bit of "extra" stuff.

I have learned in my few but wise years that it's always healthy to alert the owners of the precious items that you are about to dump that you are, in fact about to dump them.

Stuart says it's better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission. This is something we will NOT teach the boys. Ahem.

I wanted to take small bites out of this house and not try and turn my mom's world inside out. I mean, it's already upside down with the arrival of 4 humans and 2 fur-mans. Let's not upset this teetering balance too much.

With due diligence, I began with one cabinet at a time. But first was the pantry. (I wish I would have taken before pictures but let's just say that they didn't look like the after pictures.)

We didn't have to get rid of that much food, it was just a matter of organizing into a more manageable system.

This cabinet used to be a miss-mash of stuff. We turned it into the medicine cabinet primarily because medicine used to be out on the counter and with kiddos running around now, higher is safer.

Cups. Again, just shuffling around.

Plates and bowls. I did clean out a lot of extra plates so now all we have are the everyday plates/bowls and my mom's china at the top.

This was another "throw away" cabinet. I decided to make this the dog cabinet and then some extra storage for bigger items.

Hall linen closet. This was crazy! There were 9 twin sheet sets and only 1 twin size bed in the house! The top shelf is king size sheet sets, shelf two is medicine from our house, shelf two is twin size sheet sets, shelf three is queen size sheet sets, shelf four is towels and the floor is humidifier and hand towels. You might be wondering why the twin size sheets are before the queen size. Yes? Well, the perfectly plain answer is that shelf three is a little bit taller than shelf four and I couldn't donate ALL the twin size sheets so they had to be bumped up on the system. I know, it bugs me too but at least their all placed together.  

Not to bad, eh?