the organized year.

I constantly wish that I inherited my mom's cleaning gene, because she is an organization guru... You ask her where something is and she can tell you to a T, and miraculously, it's always there. I don't know why this didn't fascinate me before, but now that I'm a mom it's amazing I can find anything on a day-to-day basis. It just happens that way! If you're not intentional, everything falls. So. I've decided I need to finally get a grasp on organization and just do it.

So with that, I'm going to commit to organizing our home this year, bit by bit. And I'm going to post about it. {Eeek! Good ole accountability!} I was debating about posting all of this on my sidecar site, HealthyBecause, because I think being orderly is healthy, but as I don't really have any projects going right now here, VP is where it's at. So here we go.

Step 1: Identify problems. I've noticed that it's my tendency to not finish home or craft projects. Let's be honest. As soon as I get bored or tired, I justify walking away and leaving it as it is for who knows how long. Sometimes the justification is, "I can't figure this out, I need to think about it and come back" {and then won't} or "How long have I been doing this? Time to start something new..." {and I will}. Why is this? Am I too ambitious in the beginning? Most likely. Am I not patient enough to wade through learning a new skill? Often. Whatever it is, I'd really like to get over it. We were going to "redo" our bedroom, and we got as far as painting it a new color, but nothing else really changed. More on that later. So I'd like to take unfinished to finished this year.

Step 2: A new perspective. I grabbed my camera yesterday and snapped pics of all the areas I want to organize. I feel like I see them everyday, but looking at a picture on the computer makes it different somehow. I'll share these with you as I go, as embarassing as they will be.

Step 3: Inspiration photos. For the last couple of weeks, I've been mostly googling around for inspiration pictures. Imitation will be the route I take to begin with, and I've found some really fun photos... Let's start there to whet the organizing appetite:

I love an organized bookcase. I have two that aren't really doing much except taking up space; hopefully I can make them functional and appealing to boot.

I looove the gray and white kitchen... But we have honey-colored wood in our kitchen, along with cream-colored cabinets. Not sure gray would be the best choice...

How cute is this? Maybe for Liv's drawer someday?

I also love this bookshelf. Would be easy to make... and could be a great place for baby's library books. {Seeing is remembering to return them :)}

Step 4: Pick a place and start. This week, my goal is a small one {as much as I want to start with the kitchen! See?? Over ambitious!}. I want go through and organize the upstairs linen closet. Here's a before picture.

Dum dum dummmm...