Organizing | The Ma Family

I love it when the girls come home from daycare inÂ child care Claremont Meadows and school and can’t wait to show me their latest artwork. Â We talk about it and then it sits on the island in the kitchen until I sort through it. Â I keep every item that is made with hand prints. Â I just think they are adorable and it’s a way to capture their growth over the years in a cute way. Â I also keep all holiday decorations to use over the years.

It’s the everything-other-than-hand-print papers that are the issue. Â Truth be told…these papers wind up in the recycle bin buried under newspapers. Â There have been times I’ve felt guilty about putting their creations there but there is just no way we have the space to keep every paper that comes into the house.

This morning I couldn’t sleep so I was checking out PinterestÂ and I found this wonderful app for my iPhone from Artkive. Â (It will be available for Android in September!)

Artkive allows you to photograph your child’s artwork with your smart phone. Â Then when you’re ready you can create a coffee table book of their creations. Â Once you set up your account you can add each child and you can create a book for each one. Â Brilliant!

With a new school year about to start I’m VERY excited to have this app. Â If you’re interested go to Artkive now as the app is FREE. Â I don’t know how long it will be until you have to pay for it so check it out now!

My mom’s pantry has always been less than organized. Â It seems that within the last few years it has seen an overload of items.

I offered to help my mom organize it and she was quick to take me up on the offer. Â What came as a surprise to her was my emptying of the entire pantry in order to assess just exactly we were dealing with. Â She kept commenting that she couldn’t believe I was going to empty the entire pantry, she thought I would take it shelf by shelf and drawer by drawer. Had we done that we would have created at least double the work for ourselves.

By pulling everything out we were able to discover a few things that needed tossed due to being expired. Â This is what happens when you have an overload of items put away anywhere since sometimes this can even bring problems as house pests, but for this you can contact toÂ golewisvillepestcontrol.com to help with these issues. Â We were also able to find items that needed to be relocated to another area of the house.

Mom has been ridding her kitchen of plastic containers and replacing them with glass. Whilst we’re on the subject of kitchen design a decent coffee machine is a must for any new kitchen. Fortunately for this makeover mom had been saving glass containers for this project. Â Since there were different kinds of flour and dry goods the label maker got quite a workout that day as well.

Here are some before and after photos: