Organizing

5 Tips to Save and Sort Children’s Paper Mementos

May 25, 2011 by Painter Mommy 2 Comments

Guest Post by Tom Walker

If you are a parent, then you realize that every time your child picks up a package of crayons and a piece of paper, they are creating a priceless masterpiece. What could look like a page of scribbles to anyone else is a work of art to you. After years of collecting these treasured mementos, the question many parents find themselves asking is this: Where do we put them? This article will give you five tips on how to safely store and sort through your children’s works of art so that you can enjoy the most special forever.

1. Store The Best

If you try to keep every scrap of paper that your child ever took a marker to, you will soon be over-run. You should sort through the piles of art work regularly, choosing the best to keep, and discarding creations that are less-personal. All art-work should be carefully labeled with your child’s name, age, and the date that it was created. If asked, children are often happy to sign and date their work—saving you the time and hassle. Plastic storage totes are great for storing this home-made art and can easily be concealed in a closet or under a bed. If you have more than one child, consider buying smaller, individual storage totes so that you can keep their handiwork separate.

2. Weed Through Them – Often

If your child comes home with a pile of color pages, don’t feel that they all have to go on the fridge. Instead, sort through and find the best, while disposing of those that seem sloppy or half-done. Rather than let your child know that you are throwing away their work, comment on the exceptionally good pictures and sneak the others into the trash when they aren’t looking.

3. Recycle

Are you completely over-run by drawings? If so, sort through and pick out some of your least favorites. With a little work, children can be easily convinced that recycling the rejected drawings would be the best idea. Rather than say that the drawing wasn’t good, tell your children that it was so special that you would like to use it to wrap a present. By using unwanted artwork in this way, you will be able to rid your house of added clutter while providing yourself with cute, colorful wrapping paper that is completely free.

4. Take A Picture!

In a house of children, it’s easy for papers to become torn, lost, or destroyed. To save yourself from the disaster of a prized picture being annihilated, take a picture of your child holding their work of art. No matter what happens to the original, children can keep the photo and enjoy showing it off to family and friends. Having photos of artwork can often help parents decide which of the originals they should actually keep and which ones can head out to the recycling bin. Keep copies of all photos on a disk that you can easily insert into the computer when your children want to see their creations; consider calling it something like your “digital gallery”.

5. Show Them Off

Children love to see that their careful work is appreciated, so take the time to pick out the best of their designs and display them on the fridge or another special area of the house. Consider which art is actually worthy of being displayed based on the time and effort spent on it. Showing off artwork proves to children that you appreciate what they have done and that you are proud of their talents.

By taking the time to actually consider what artwork is worthy of being kept, appeasing children with your “digital gallery”, and recycling, storing artwork just became a much easier task!

Tom Walker analyses ink cartridges all day every day and has become an internet researcher of Dell ink, among other things.

5 Ways to Reduce Clutter

April 29, 2011 by Painter Mommy Leave a Comment

This is a guest post by James Adams

Even if you are generally a neat person, clutter can tend to build up around the best of us almost automatically and certainly uncannily. Besides its obvious organizational problems, clutter is rumored to also have a number of psychological effects on us. It is said that clutter makes it harder to focus or work on things that matter to us. Even in only slightly cluttered environments, the bare minimum of mess can lead to a more confusing, distracting life than necessary. Here are a few other ways clutter can reduce your productivity whether in the office or at home.

5 Ways Clutter Can Affect Your Productivity

1. Lost in the Shuffle

An increase in the clutter usually means an increase in losing important things in it. Besides keys and wallets, important papers and receipts are some of the first things to go. When you have to spend time sifting through the clutter to find the things you need, productive minutes and hours are lost.

2. Reduced Work Space

The more space you reserve for clutter, the less space you can use to work in. In the best case scenario you will feel slightly more cramped, and in the worst case scenario you won’t be able to find a free square foot to rest your elbows. Both work and clutter take space. It’s up to you to decide which is more deserving.

3. Stress

Many people admit that a cluttered house or office does nothing to take away from the stress level in their life and, in fact, may add to it. Some people say that stress stems from clutter, and others insist that clutter comes from stress. Either way, they are closely related, and cutting down on one may just help to cut down on the other.

4. Mañana, mañana

Clutter is well known to be a source of serious procrastination, and this can take place in a number of ways. For some, clutter can divide their attention between pressing work and pressing housework. For others, clutter puts more interesting things into their line of vision than the work at hand. However it happens, clutter simply does not motivate you to work hard.

5. Downer

Besides all the technical and scientific aspects of clutter and its physical effects on your work habits, clutter can be a real mood killer. Having to step over piles of junk, static, flotsam, and jetsam just to maneuver around your own personal space can provoke frustration and drain enthusiasm, bringing on bouts of depression and low energy.

Better just to get rid of it. Here are five ways to help you cut down on the clutter in your environment and keep your life tidier and more organized.

5 Tips for Reducing Clutter

1. Cubbyhole It

Divide your clutter up into main categories and designate a certain specific location for each category. Papers can be filed out of sight. Jewelry can be put into the jewelry drawer. Have a shelf to keep all your books in an easily remembered order, and a good, deep bin for the trash. Don’t be afraid to throw things out that you no longer need.

2. Begin Small

If the clutter in your house is overwhelming and just the thought of taking care of it all makes you light-headed, consider devoting just five or ten minutes to whittling it down a bit today. Then, do the same tomorrow. Repeat as needed until, as if by magic, your house slowly but surely turns into a haven of peace and organization once again.

3. Storage

Although storage is considered in many circles to be just another form of clutter, if you can’t bring yourself to throw something out, having it out of sight and in a box is much better than keeping it on your desk beside a pile of gum wrappers. Use the attic and the garage to store your clutter – that’s what they’re for – and keep your personal spaces tidy.

4. Ask for Help

If you are no organizational expert, get someone who is to come in and give you a few suggestions. Your more organized friends will probably consider it an honor to be invited over in a professional advisory capacity and many will probably even enjoy helping you through the process.

5. Keep it Up!

Getting rid of clutter is a lifetime process. The only way to keep it down for good is to keep at it.

James works at Spares Next Day, one of the top suppliers of vacuum bags in the UK.

School Paper Overload

November 17, 2010 by Painter Mommy 3 Comments

Two of my four children are now in school. One is in kindergarten and one is in 1st grade. Each of them have a folder that they bring home that contains their daily homework assignments, notes from the school, and also completed classwork and homework from the previous day. On average they bring home about 10 sheets of paper everyday. Most of it I just throw away without even looking at it. Yeah, I know… I am one of those bad moms who just doesn’t care to know every single detail of what my child is learning.

My 1st grader comes home with booklets of papers all stapled together going through EVERYTHING that they are learning and what they will be learning the following week and so on and so on. Don’t get me wrong, I am happy that the school is so efficient and detailed and take the initiative in keeping the parents involved, but I also think that there could be another way rather than wasting sooooo much paper. How about email???

10 sheets of paper everyday means 70 sheets of paper in one week and 300 sheets of paper in one month, and 3,600 sheets of paper in one year! Craziness!

Well, instead of immediately throwing all the paper away, I decided to create a space to keep it so that my children could use it as drawing paper. One side of the paper is usually blank so it is great to use for when the kids want to color with their crayons, markers, and colored pencils.

How about you? Do you get bombarded with paper from your child’s school? Do you take the time to read it all? Please share in the comment section below!

Photo from www.keephomesimple.blogspot.com

Picking Up Around the House (Before it Gets out of Control)

November 19, 2009 by Painter Mommy 7 Comments

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No, this is NOT a picture of my house. LOL But, there are MANY parents who DO have rooms in their homes that look just like this. I have actually seen worse. For a while there was a show on A&E called Hoarders and I don’t know, but I really loved it. It was hard for me to fathom how some of the people lived collecting junk and not able to let any of it go. Some people literally lived in filth and garbage and it was all because they had this emotional attachment to THINGS. It was so sad to see how hoarding totally destroyed their lives and many are not able to get out of it.

But for many families clutter and mess is actually the norm. Maybe not to the extent of hoarding, but like the picture of the room above. I mean you can still see the floor, but the STUFF is everywhere!

If you have multiple children, then you know how difficult it can be to keep your home clean and in order. It seems like everyday there is a new mess to clean. The toys are everywhere. There are crumb trails leading from the kitchen to the living room. It just never ends! It can be even hard to stay on top of things for those parents who work outside of the home. If you are working all day and only have a few hours at night to tend to the many other responsibilities, then there is even less time to clean up.

I have been very blessed to be able to work both in and out of the home. I am able to set my own schedule. But even then, when things get ultra busy – it is really easy to put off getting the house in order. And once you let it go for even just a week or 2, it can be a HUGE challenge and take an entire weekend to get back on track.

So, I have come up with a few ideas that work for me and my family that help us stay on top of the small messes around the house so that they do not get out of hand. I hope that they will help you as well.

1. Get the Kids Involved. You can start your children out early with helping you do small chore like tasks around the house. You can give each child a specific job that they do on a daily basis like making their bed. Or you can also cal on them as you need help to do things like set the table or get a garbage bag to put in the garbage. I used to have a special sheet with little chore pictures on it for my children and when each thing got done, they got a sticker next to the chore. We did it for about a month and my kids didn’t care about it anymore. I am thinking about starting this up again though. I am definitely guilty of not being consistent and that is really important.

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2. All Messes Gone Before Bedtime. This is something that has really helped me to feel more peaceful at night. Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of having a separate playroom just for the kids. We have to share the living room space with the kids. So, it is even more important that the toys do not get out of hand. My children know that they cannot take out all the toys at once and they can only play with a few things at a time. They also know that all the toys need to be put away in their specific bins before we start our nightly routine.

3. Daily Cleaning Routine. I not only follow the above rule for the kid’s toys, but I also do the same for other areas of the house. The kitchen is one of them. I make sure all food is put away, dishes are done, floor is swept and clean, etc. But a big thing for me, is during the day, when I am walking from room to room and I see something out of place, I don’t ignore it like many of us would. I actually take the time to stop and pick up whatever it is and put it away. And at the end of the day, Ido a walk around the house to make sure all the random little things are put away like papers, random toys, clothes, etc.

This helps keep things totally under control so that when we wake up in the morning, the house is clean and there is not so much to deal with. If you keep up with the smaller messes on a daily basis and are consistent, then you will never have to deal with an entire weekend of cleaning and organizing again! Of course, you have to still CLEAN, but the organizing part will not be as overwhelming.

So, how about you? Any neat ways that you like to keep your home in order?

What To Do With all those Kid’s Crafts from School

October 12, 2009 by Painter Mommy 12 Comments

I have always been a huge fan of handmade things, ESPECIALLY from my children. And since both my oldest children have been going to preschool since age 3, they have come home with some really wonderful things. I usually put them on the refrigerator so we can enjoy them. Most of the crafts are seasonal, so I like to save them and use them the following year (the ones that are in good condition after surviving the fridge) 🙂 .

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For the past 2 years, I have put all the crafts into a drawer until just recently the drawer became so packed that I could not add one more craft to the pile. I have always had in mind to get this organized but always put it off. So today, I FINALLY figured out what to do.

Initially I really wanted to purchase some kind of sectioned organizing system like a big box with hanging folders. But because some of the crafts are over sized, I knew that wouldn’t work. So I came up with the idea to buy poster board and fold it in half and staple it along the open edges so it would make a really big envelope. I would then have each envelope labeled for that particular season or holiday. But again, I have been putting off getting to an office supply store.

When I woke up today, I was totally inspired to figure this craft thing out once and for all. I never got the poster board, but I realized that I had a whole bunch of manila folders that I was not using. I opened one up, cut off the tabs to make a perfect rectangle and then stapled it to another one on 3 sides leaving one side open at the top.

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I then took some clear packing tape and attached it to the back of the folder. I folded it over and stuck it to the other side and then added a label. I categorized the craft folders by both seasons and holidays.

This is really going to help me keep the kid’s special crafts organized so I can enjoy them for years to come. And this doesn’t mean I will save absolutely everything. I definitely don’t want to do that. With 4 kids I am sure there will be hundreds of crafts over the years. I really want to keep the ones that are special. And as new crafts come in, I will be getting rid of some from the envelopes. But at least now, I can open up each separate folder at that specific season and use the crafts to decorate around the house. I am going to keep them in a cabinet so they can be easily accessed and not get ruined.

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So, what do you think about my kid’s craft organizational system? Do you think it is something that would help you? And if you already have a system, please share!