Yes, that title was a reference to a hip-hop song...

Remember my life is all teens... All the time!

Here is my updated list of areas of the house I plan to sort...

Remember... If I complete this whole list in under 40 days I have a little reward for myself planned that involves a day spa...

1. Coat Rack / back door area in Kitchen

2. Bakers rack in Kitchen

3. Under Kitchen Sink

4. Kitchen gadgets (in crocks and drawers)

5. Upper Kitchen cabinets

6. Lower kitchen cabinets

7. Entertainment center

8. DVD collection

9. Shelves in cellar stairs

10. Pantry

11. Linen Closet

12. bathroom

13. gift wrap bins

14. Allison's Closet

15. Allison's room (started)

16. back deck

17. entry way

18. Our closet

19. Our Dresser

20. My nightstand

21. Craft supply shelves

22. Party supply bins

23. Office supply shelves

24. Christmas decor

25. Laundry room

26. freezers

27. "paper goods" shelves

28. "Other Seasonal" decor bins

29. book shelves

30. Katy's old bedroom

31. Shelves in storage area in basement

32. "messy corner" in my bedroom

33. basket on top of microwave (our "junk drawer")

34. bookcase in my bedroom

35. stuff in "trunk" of our vehicle

36. Old Magazines in pile in my bedroom

37. cedar chest

38. "mess" in living room/kitchen from basement sort

39. girls "keepsakes" and toys in basement bins

40. My brother's childhood crap stuff he left here 25 years ago when he moved out...

Only 6 locations left to sort and I have over 30 days (whoops... typo) over 3 days to do it... Day spa, here I come!!!

Here is a peek at some of my sorting in the kitchen...

My knife drawer before...

 Gadget Drawer Before...

 Gadget crock before...

 Back about ten years ago my mom put up these "kitchen organizers" that I am in the process of taking down... Oh and that 80's wallpaper is outta here too!

I got these spiffy new steak knives as a gift about a year ago, but haven't put them in the knife drawer since it was overloaded!

 Look at the contents of that ONE drawer...

Whoa! Hoarder much??

 Look, an actual "after" picture!

I am going this weekend to buy drawer organizers so the 1970's green silverware tray is out of here, and I will show you the other "after" shots when I get them installed, but they have been sorted, so they are off the list! (Yes, we need all those nut crackers... For lobster... Yum!)

Oh and Katy & Jed bought a new (to them) car about two weeks ago...

The only vehicle they had was his work truck, so they are BOTH thrilled... Her not to be riding in his "nasty" work truck and him because of the savings in gas!

Aren't they cute?

Thanks for listening,

Getting Down To Busy-ness...

Wowzers... And I thought I was busy in the weeks leading up to the wedding... Unless I am forgetting the "pain" so to speak, I am just as busy now!

River, the art teacher who I share my classroom with and I finally got a chance to get into our "new" classroom Monday and get it set up... At least mostly... As I said before, the school rents space in an old high school that currently houses the town's library on the first floor... The school I will be teaching at is only starting it's sixth year and each year it grows... Last year we were able to "borrow" the space for art classes but since the school didn't rent it they couldn't set the room up as a classroom. This year the room is ours but we couldn't get into it until this week... The rush was that all the students and their parents would be at the school at 6:00 Monday night... River and I wanted the room at least a little classroom like before they got there... As of 11:00 AM it was a big empty room... Actually, it was worse then an empty room... The school secretary kinda panicked about how bare it was and spent all morning setting up the meeting in that room.

So we arrived at 11:00 at the school with all hands on deck... River, her husband and their three little ones, Paul, Allison, Dakota, Jed, Katy and myself  ready to tackle the room and found it full of chairs and fully set up for a meeting. We had to break it to the super sweet 70+ year old volunteer school secretary that we were going to have to undo what she spent all morning working on! We had three trucks loaded down with shelves, tables and desks that had to go into that room... So we started the day by moving all the chairs and such into the lunch room and re-setting up the meeting... Next we had to move all the donated furniture into the room, clean it, (as most of it came out of garages and basements) then set it up... It turned out, after the first two hours we had too many helpers... River and I were spending more time answering questions than working on the room, so I sent my crew home, only keeping Allison to help me, and River sent her kiddos off with her husband, but unfortunately started to not feel well and ended up leaving herself... It was fine, I had Allison until 4:00 and we got tons done... I wish I'd thought to take pictures... I will tomorrow when I go up there to finish. I ended up calling Paul and asking him to grab me some clean clothes for the meeting, since I was just going to stay and work. It was about 80% done by the time the parents and student started showing up at 6:00! Yay!

The meeting went great... We had a good turn out. I only got to meet about half my students... I am the "new" teacher so I am somewhat of the "unknown", so it was a bit strange. All the new students and incoming freshmen and their parents were bold and came right up and introduced themselves, but the returning students either avoided me altogether or were very timid... The school being so small and young has had staffing changes every year, so you think they would be used to it, but having a new teacher seems to really unnerve them... Which is especially strange, since a least half of them already know me! The students I did meet seem super great, and I can't wait to get going. I really wish I didn't have to wait until next Wednesday to start teaching! We have teacher work day all day Tuesday, then the student are there Wednesday! WooHoo!

The whole house sort is still going on... I am nearly done with the basement, and will be moving onto the main floor later this week... The biggest challenge so far has been getting the donation piles bagged/boxed and the trash bagged and out of the house... It kinda piles up quick and I am always trying to wrangle people to haul it out, so I don't have to keep starting and stopping. To answer one readers question as to why 40 days... This was originally a Lenten challenge, I first heard about it two years ago, but Lent was already half over so I decided to do it the next year... This year I was so crazy busy with the wedding I didn't even realize it was lent (being protestant) until it was a week into it... I decided that if I put it off for another whole year, it wasn't ever going to happen and decided to commit to doing it before the summer was over... It wasn't looking good, to tell you the truth, but when I got the teaching job I felt like "it's now or never" and am trying to power through all the big areas before school starts...

I am also trying not to be emotional as Allison and I shop for her very last first day of school which happens later this week... (sob)... I can't believe my baby is so close to done... She could have graduated last year but we missed the cut-off... She is only going in every other day for two classes... One science, and French 4... She really didn't need much in the way of back to school stuff and was willing to forgo the whole thing with the exception of some new jeans, since we are sorting everything she saw how much she has... Such a mature attitude, but I was not willing to give up my last back to school shopping adventure... I convinced her I needed stuff and so she went along with me... She did let me buy her a new Vera Bradly wristlet, some new bras and the stuff to make a new tote bag. (More on that later.)

I have to get back to lesson planning...

Thanks for listening,

40 Bags in 40 Days... Updated...

I first heard of the forty bags in forty days challenge when a friend posted it on her facebook page... I looked it up and discovered Clover Lane... Sarah is a super cute mom of FIVE with one due any day... If anyone knows organization it's a pregnant mom of 5!!! She of course is a big time blogger and has no idea who I am or that I am running with her idea...

The premise seems to be that you commit to getting rid of at least 40 bags of stuff in 40 days... Some of those will be trash bags and some will be "donation" bags, but all of them will be bags of clutter that will be gone from our home! Some areas will of course produce less then a "full" bag and others will produce a lot more... Also sometimes I may power through a bunch of locations in one day or some may require more then one day to finish... I am trying not to sweat the small stuff here... The goal is to clean out and organize!

We started this weekend by unloading EVERY box, bin and all misc stuff from the basement onto a tarp in the yard... (This is all the stuff we had when we moved here... We had a household worth of stuff in Tennessee and my mother and step-father had a VERY full house when we got here... Aghhh!) Once it was in the yard the girlies and I opened and sorted as much as we could... I got rid of four huge trash bags of stuff and we took two full loads to the Goodwill... I was also able to bless the girlies with quite a bit of useful stuff for their (current or future) homes. It was a great kickoff to my 40 day purge, but a lot of it ended up in my livingroom for further sorting... I have to succeed in this quest at this point or burn the place down...

I will be encouraging my mother to sort and purge a lot of her stuff too... We'll see if she is in the mood, but hopeful "organizing fever" will take over our household!

I will be blogging before and after pictures for most of the clean outs... I did promise Paul soon after I started blogging, not to publish our bedroom... That was the only request for privacy he had, so I try very hard to comply... But other then our bedroom I will try to do before/after pictures.

Today is August 20, 2012 and my goal is to be done by October 1. 2012...

Here goes...

1. Coat Rack / back door area in Kitchen
2. Bakers rack in Kitchen
3. Under Kitchen Sink
4. Kitchen gadgets (in crocks and drawers)
5. Upper Kitchen cabinets
6. Lower kitchen cabinets
7. Entertainment center
8. DVD collection
9. Shelves in cellar stairs
10. Pantry
11. Linen Closet
12. bathroom
13. gift wrap bins
14. Allison's Closet
15. Allison's room
16. back deck
17. entry way
18. Our closet
19. Our Dresser
20. My nightstand
21. Craft supply shelves
22. Party supply bins
23. Office supply shelves
24. Christmas decor
25. Laundry room
26. freezers
27. "paper goods" shelves
28. "Other Seasonal" decor bins
29. book shelves
30. Katy's old bedroom
31. Shelves in storage area in basement
32. "messy corner" in my bedroom
33. basket on top of microwave (our "junk drawer")
34. bookcase in my bedroom
35. stuff in "trunk" of our vehicle
36. Old Magazines in pile in my bedroom
37. cedar chest
38. "mess" in livingroom/kitchen from basement sort
39. girls "keepsakes" and toys in basement bins
40. My brother's childhood crap stuff he left here 25 years ago when he moved out...

Wish me luck!

Thanks for listening,

Sprucing Up The Camp...

In Maine if you have a little cabin you go to you don't call it that you call it a "camp"... My parents have one on a little island off the coast called Islesboro...

(I told you guys about it last year... Chick HERE if you don't remember.)

It is for sale and it has been since last year, but even tough it got lots of hits it never got past people viewing it inside because like their home it was neglected and full of clutter. The four of us have spend a lot of time decluttering and cleaning... We have made a lot of progress hauling 22 contractor size trash bags of garbage and three truck loads of stuff for the Goodwill... We are ready to start staging in earnest, but I thought I'd show you the progress... Since I wasn't blogging when we started this project I didn't think to take "before" pictures, so you will have to imagine it with 22 (yes 22!) additional pieces of furniture...

Here is the "porch" where you enter...

It was always a quiet place to grab a nap or read...

But that sofa-bed is a torture device strait out of the middle-ages!

Here is the kitchen...

The door to the left goes to the porch...

(I picked up this little bistro set on clearance at Lowe's for $79.00...

Isn't it cute?)

There are no cabinets in the kitchen so they have this hutch...

Doesn't it just scream out for a coat of white paint (or 10 coats??)

I am planning to do this soon and when the camp sells I have the perfect spot for it here at home!

Here is the view down the hall...

To the left is the living room, strait ahead is the bedroom and to the right is the bathroom...

Let's look at the living room next...

(I've moved the microwave back to the kitchen... We were still cleaning when I took this shot.)

I just found a cute new area rug for this room at HomeGoods... I can't wait to see it in this room!

The wood stove surround is next on Paul's to do list...

He has spent the last two trips rebuilding the exterior steps so I guess I can't complain too much.

Here is the daybed where the girlies sleep... I had to throw away the pillow that were on it and am currently making new ones...

Here is the bedroom...

This room needs a lot of work still... There has been little other then decluttering/cleaning go on in here.

I would love to paint the entire interior of the whole camp white to give it a beach feel, but there is only so much time we can spend over there...

I'll take pictures as we finish projects... It isn't such a bad deal, sure we have a lot of work to do, but it is on my favorite island in the world... It is too nice over there for words to describe.

Thanks for listening,

Domicile Changes...

As you can imagine the past seven months have brought about big changes in the house too... I decided to take a break from people updates to share a couple with you. I don't know if I told you this or not but when we first arrived in Maine my parents house was neglected and full of clutter. The girlies and I worked around the clock when we first got here cleaning and decluttering... It is a process that is going on til this day. One of the major issues was seating in the living room. They had two recliners that were surrounded by stuff in which they lived their lives... My husband called it command centeral. Here, I'll show you...

I didn't really take any good pictures of the whole area but you get the idea.

The only other seating in the living room was one additional recliner (Like the one above) and a tiny love-seat... No, seriously a tiny love-seat...

Here, I took some pictures at Christmas time, have a look...

To give you an idea of scale that green pillow is only 7". Two of us could sit on here, but it was snug. One of the issues I discussed with my parents before I moved here was the lack of seating in the living room... Even with two of us on the love seat, there was still only room for three people to sit in this room besides the two of them... Oh, and at last head count there are four of us... Not good. Another problem is that they rarely leave the living room. They sit/doze in their chairs from 8:30 in the morning until about 3:00 AM... And the TV is on the whole time... The four of us were stuck spending most of our time on the bed in Paul's and my room. This got old fast and we were never able to have company over because first of all, where would they sit. Secondly with my parents front and center in the living room, when people did come over it was awkward to visit. We were all miserable... One of my gifts is hospitality... I love, love, love to have people over. We came up with a solution. Paul and I set up a make-shift bedroom for us in the basement and we moved their recliners (command central and all) into a "den" for them... Now they can sit there watching TV nineteen hours a day with clutter piled as high as they want it and we can all use the living room!

That brings us up to today... We got a new sofa about six weeks ago and I finally decided to change around some of the pictures... This is the before...

(excuse the computer and various other clutter...)

See that little shelf there? It had a bunch of nick-knacks on it that I had just taken down to dust for the 6000th time this summer when I decided enough is enough. We had decided two weeks ago that painting this room was going to have to wait until next spring. (Darn priority list...) So I decided to go ahead and change it up some. Paul thought this was a waste of time but I told him it would give me a chance to see if I like it this way or not... He walked off totally uninterested, but lucky for me there are always plenty of extra teens around here (being summer and all) and since I am the keeper of the food, I was able to do this tiny project without breaking a sweat. First we took down that little shelf that had been up there since my mother was into "home interiors" back in the 80s... Wanna see what happens to a wall when you leave a shelf in one spot for 30+ years?? Here, take a look...

Keeping it real folks...

Let me just pause here and thank whoever invented magic erasers...

(A moment of silence in their honor)

Anyhow... My parents have lots of art work laying around so I decided to keep one of the paintings and add one of a ship that they had in a closet...

Tell me what you think...

I think I like it...

Here is a close up of the paintings.

While we are in the living room I'll show you a couple other things I've done...

I am seriously in love with this John Waller song...

So I got out the ole cricut and added this...

I have also been changing out the stuff on top of the entertainment center seasonally...

Here was Christmas...

(here it is closer and no "minion")

(The clock, swan and striped candles are my mom's and she wants them to stay...

I'm working with them.)

I changed it up for Valentine's, St Patrick's, & Easter, but didn't take any pictures.

For summer I decided to go with a "sea-side" theme...

The sea glass and urchins are from a little shop in town. Other then the little star fish in the front one it is stuff the girlies have beach combed this year.

These lanterns are from Home Goods... The big white one was on clearance for $5.00 and the little blue one was only $1.00! The stuff in it cost me more then both lanterns!

Well, I guess that's enough for today... Two posts in one day...

I'm gonna wear you guys out!

(Hello... anyone still there?? I know this was a long post, but really, I have a lot of catching up to do!)

Thanks for listening,

Rainy Days & Mondays...

Are both getting me down...

I know I promised you pictures of the fall decorating we did in the front yard, but it has been gray and rainy pretty much ever since... The sun did pop out for a little bit on Saturday while I was out running errands, but by the time I got home the fog had rolled back in... Ahhh, the joys of living on the coast.

Hopefully the weather will change for the better soon... The leaves are all changing and I want to take some photos to share with y'all... I may take a few today either way... It is just so beautiful here!

Paul spent most of his free time last week cleaning out a shed that was just too full for him to tackle previously... When he finished he told me he had put aside some items for me to check out. He told me he knows I'm always looking for "odd items" to decorate with... (I don't know how to take that...) Anyhow I headed out to the shed and this is what I found...

Oars...

Clearly these needed closer inspection...

Really nice antique oars in good shape...

Cute... right down to the leather grips...

Oh, he was sooo right, I have been looking for the perfect place to hang these all weekend...

I'll let you know when I find the right spot...

Here are some ideas I found online:

I like this one from Coastal Living...

But it's a little to "white" for me...

The rest of these are from Completely Coastal...

I like the "X" pattern these are hung in, but lets face it, the only thing our home has in common with this picture is that we own a couple oars...

This is a cute idea...

So is this one...

But this last one is really more "me"...

I even have a fun shelf that would work and a large red mirror that might look even better then the little black ones... It would be a completely different color scheme, but I can see it in my mind now. 

Ohhh... I just had a thought,  Paul also found some cool antique railroad lanterns in the basement...

Now I'm really excited to get started!

But they weren't all he found...

He also found these...

Antique wooden lobster buoys... Three really unique ones...

Most of the buoys these days are foam...

Like this one...

Reproduction wooden ones abound in tourist type shops but actual, old wooden ones are often snapped up by decorators and/or antique dealers and can be somewhat expensive...

I can't wait to figure out where and how to use these inside...

Way to go Paul!

Thanks for listening,