home organization | living peacefully with children

Photo by Wayne Wilkinson

With a new year looming, many people are looking to organize their homes. My children came to me with a request for 2012. They wanted to order Motivated Moms. We haven’t used Motivated Moms in a couple of years, but they liked the system so well that they wanted to reimplement it.

Motivated Moms has daily, weekly, monthly, and periodic chores, all on printable pages that you can place wherever is convenient. We have our sheet up on the fridge where everyone can access it. The idea is to keep up with a little bit of cleaning every day so that nothing piles up. Clutter spots are attacked in small increments so that it isn’t overwhelming.

I will say we have only ever used the secular weekly planner, so I can’t honestly attest to any of the other versions. The one we have is easily tweaked to fit our family, and the kids like crossing off things as they get them done, just as I do (nature or nurture?). No one forgets to help out, and those days when it feels like nothing is going right and I’m not getting anything done? I can look and see that I am getting things done, just perhaps not what my plans were.

The download is only $8, which is not bad for having almost everything our family needs already made into lists. Earlier this week I was able to use the code HAPPY for $1/off.

Going gluten free has brought about numerous new flours and starches to our lives, along with large amounts of nuts. My desire for organization was being taunted by all of the little bags tossed on a shelf in our small pantry. I couldn’t take it anymore and had to do something about it when January hit.

In a perfect world, all of the containers would be glass and they would be neatly labelled with a label maker. Of course, in a perfect world, my pantry would not be a re-purposed linen closet in the hallway outside of my kitchen.

Target brand food storage containers stack easily and are extremely inexpensive. Printer paper and tape work just fine for labels. I can now look in our pantry and not cringe. Better yet, we can actually find the ingredients we need for baking.

Our bulk goods and storage are located on industrial shelving in our utility room.