A Much Needed Vacation

Happy Monday to all of you! Things have been a bit quiet on the Open Concept Organizing front for the past week. The Mister and I ventured off on a much needed vacation and explored Michigan's Upper Peninsula for 8 days. We had a great time and enjoyed our days away from the internet and our electronic devices! It's for that reason that I do not have an organizing post for you today. I decided to give myself the freedom to take a break from the blog for a week as well. Never fear, it's back to work today! 

I hope you all have a wonderful week and take some time to relax for yourselves as well. I'll be back next Monday with a brand spankin' new post. I'll leave you with a few snapshots from our time away. Take care!

Closet Update - Take 3!

There is something liberating about cleaning out a closet. I especially love when I have a donate pile in the end. 

I’m continuing my quest to reduce my wardrobe to a manageable size. And by manageable, I mean to only needing one closet. I started back in January with something called Project 333, in which you choose 33 items to wear for 3 months. I’ve been through two cycles and I’m loving it. The beginning of July marked the beginning of cycle number 3 so I thought I’d share an update on this project. If you missed the first and second cycle, you can click here and here.

Over the last three months, things got a bit out of hand. 

When it’s 55 degrees one day and 95 degrees the next, it’s difficult to have a set wardrobe. When I picked my items for “spring”, I picked some light sweaters and blouses and some short sleeve tops. Well, spring wasn’t much of a spring. We had more of a winter and then a summer this year so the light sweaters proved to be too warm for most of this cycle. There were a few of my items that I wore no more than once over the past three month period.

To start the clean-out process, I again emptied everything from my closet.

I went through my items and picked out anything I didn’t wear or only wore once and determined if it fit better in a different season or if I just didn’t like it as much as I thought I did. It either went back in the to-be-determined piles or went in the donate pile. Then I picked items out that I wanted to continue to wear for the next three months. I definitely have some staple items that I think will remain year round. Staple items help me understand what items to invest in in the future. For example, I have a black and white polka dot blouse that I have worn to work almost every week since January. I love it. It’s comfortable, stylish, and can be worn a multitude of ways. So, in the future when I am shopping for new tops for work, I know to base my choices on something similar to that blouse.

Once I had the items I wanted to keep, I went back through my stashed away items to determine what I’d like to include for the next three months. The mosquitoes in our yard this year require an outfit more like this every evening.

{Image Via}

Nevertheless, I ended up with 4 pairs of pants, 6 blazers, 4 skirts, 3 button down shirts, 3 pairs of jeans, 4 dresses, and 9 short sleeve shirts/blouses. Included in that count are three new tops I purchased for the summer which allowed me to add 9 new outfit possibilities to my summer wardrobe. I refuse to purchase a clothing item that only gives me one outfit option. These three tops can certainly be carried over into other seasons as well. One was a thrift store find and the other two were on deep sales, so I was happy with that decision.

I decided that at the end of this process in December, I’m going to take all my remaining items that I haven’t worn in the past year to a consignment store and any money I make will go towards upgrading or updating the items I have remaining – not buying new additional items, but replacing worn items. Rewarding ourselves after a challenging project is a good way to stick with it, even when it gets difficult.

My mister has about 267 t-shirts stuffed into his closet. Each quarter, when I update my side of the closet, I go through his shirts and get rid of a couple he hasn’t worn in ages – assuming they don’t have any sentimental value. So I went through his shirts and pulled out 3 to add to our donate pile. (And yes, I do ask him before I take them to Goodwill!) 

I also went through our shoes and sandals and found two pairs there to donate too. 

I am still antsy for a built-in closet organization system, but I think it’s best to wait until I complete the paring down process before designing something to fit our needs. I can add that to my reward as well!

This post was shared in a link party over at:

The Week I Didn't Clean

Do you remember the Y2K scare? There were some folks who were genuinely concerned that the world would end at midnight on December 31. It happened again with the whole Mayan Calendar scare a couple years ago. And it happened at my house last week…

Let me explain.

I’m a bit of a clean freak. I’m not ashamed of that fact. I like my house to be clean. To avoid spending hours cleaning on the weekends, I wrote up a cleaning schedule that split our household cleaning tasks up across each day of the week. That has helped a lot. But I’ve been feeling rather frustrated lately. Frustrated that I can’t keep up. Frustrated that I have too much to do. Frustrated that I have no energy to do any of it. And not just cleaning, but all daily tasks in general. I’ve felt behind and unmotivated.

For those of you that have been following this blog from the beginning (thank you!), you may have noticed I started out posting three times per week. A couple months back, I dropped it down to two. Trying to get three good posts out every week while working full-time and keeping up with all my other duties was too much. I felt such a huge sense of relief when I allowed myself to drop down to two. But then about a month ago, two felt like too many. So I decided to drop it down to one good quality post each week, at least through the summer. That decision didn’t bring much of a relief; I felt guilty.

Even with that guilt-ridden decision, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something had to give. I had the realization that I am busy because I am willing to be busy and I put a lot of pressure on myself to accomplish a lot of busy-ness every week. But accomplishing all of those things was leaving me feeling empty, frustrated, tired, and kinda hopeless – wondering, what’s the point of all of this?

So I challenged myself. For one week, I was going to take a break from blog writing, and a break from cleaning. (Cue dramatic music here). 

I worried that by Saturday, the world might end. I wanted to rest and relax, spend some quality time with my Mister, and really, just prove to myself that I could go an entire week without cleaning. I went and got my haircut one evening. I did some online work to make some extra income in hopes of buying a shiny new camera lens I have my eye on. I did spend some extra time with my Mister. And, most importantly, I rested. I’m happy to report that the world did not end. The house did not fall apart. No one got sick. The township did not show up to condemn the dwelling. Life went on.

The following week, I got back on the cleaning schedule but with a different perspective. I feel less pressured to get EVERYTHING done EVERY week. I have a realization of what rest feels like and I like it. I took a look at how I spend my time every week. Once I account for working, sleeping, meal prep and eating, exercising, blogging, personal hygiene, and cleaning, I’m left with only 2% of my week free to do what I want. That’s not very much time and that’s not how I want to live my life.

Our time here is short. We need to enjoy it. We need to spend time with the people we love and we need to spend time doing what we love. Yes, there are jobs and chores and obligations. But we have to free ourselves a bit to have fun, to relax, to rest. 

If you’re a clean freak like me, I challenge you to take a week to relax. And, if you’re feeling overwhelmed with your daily and weekly duties, take a look at your schedule and see which areas you may be too hard on yourself about. To keep going strong, sometimes we need to take a step back.

This post was shared in a link party over at:

A Tale of Two Frames

There is a running joke among Michiganders that we have two seasons: winter and road construction. While the road construction season can be a pain in the neck sometimes, I prefer to think of that second season as garage sale season.

I love garage sales. One person’s junk often ends up as my treasure. I do try to think very critically at a garage sale though, ensuring I have a clear purpose for any item I choose to buy. The last thing I want is to buy something just to put it in my “to donate” pile at home. When I stumbled upon these two frames at a sale last year, I knew exactly how I’d use them. 

These frames are 21 x 21 inch frames made of solid wood. They were priced at $4 a piece, which is a steal in itself. But I did what I always do at garage sales – get my Mister involved. He is the world’s greatest negotiator. Truly, the greatest. I swear he doesn’t pay full price for anything. I don’t go to garage sales without him. Anyway, I whispered to him that I really wanted the frames and we walked out of there with both of them for $5 total. If the frames weren’t so heavy, I would have done a happy dance all the way home. 

My plan was to hang these frames in our master bedroom but they sat in my closet for a year while I debated what color to paint the walls. Now that that life changing decision has been made, I decided it’s time to hang these beauties up.

Originally, I contemplated replacing the matte in both frames. I had two options. One, I could have a local frame shop do it for me. Two, I could buy some matte board and a matte cutter and do it myself. Having it done for me proved to be way over my budget at $55 per frame. And, after weighing the idea of doing it myself, I decided the mattes in the frames really weren’t that bad and went relatively well with my new décor plan. So after all of that contemplating, I decided to leave the mattes alone.

The next decision was what to put in the frames. We’ve been married almost two years and still have zero wedding pictures hanging in our house. I’m not usually a procrastinator but when it comes to decorating, I tend to drag my feet a bit. I went through our engagement and wedding photos and picked one of each for the frames.

The current opening in the frames for a photo is 8 x 8. I learned that not every photo print shop offers 8 x 8 prints, and some of the ones who do charge quite a bit. Walmart came in at $2.84 a piece which I thought was really reasonable. Before I clicked “Order Prints” I checked out the Sam’s Club website and was pleased to find the prints for just $3.10 total and I was able to pick them up the next morning. Even more reasonable!

I pulled the frames apart, laid in my prints, and reassembled them. I knew which wall I wanted to hang them on and I knew I wanted them side by side but I wasn’t exactly sure what height to hang them at or what spacing to use between them. I revisited my own blog post about hanging art and used a couple of those techniques to find my perfect arrangement.

I traced the frames onto some brown mailing paper and then cut them out. I taped them up on the wall and played around with the spacing until I was happy with their location.

Because these frames are so heavy, I drilled my holes and put in some wall anchors first and then added some screws. 

Both prints fit the theme of the room: the first is romantic, the second is comfortable. 

I love how they turned out, and I love even more that they were only $8.10 total.

I plan to put something between them but haven't set my heart on exactly what that something is yet. I'm excited about how our master bedroom is evolving!

What’s your favorite garage sale steal?

This post was shared in a link party over at: