Thank You

 

To all those who have served or are serving. We say thank-you for your sacrifice!

All photos are from my son’s 10th Army birthday Party. Soldiers are his greatest hero's!

These Four

 

Can’t imagine life without them! What blessings they are to us!

Yes or No?

 It has come to my attention over the last year or so that we do not have enough dishes in our home for our everyday use. Well it’s finally time to buy some more. I have always had Fiesta Ware and I love it! The problem is I can’t make up my mind on the color! There are so many to choose from. I currently have scarlet and sunflower. I love the bright colors and the way the food looks on them.

Now here is the dilemma. Should I add in another color or stick with what I have?

This is the Shamrock added.

So what do you prefer? Since I am having such a hard time making a decision I though I would ask what other people thought.  I hope to have open shelving and white walls so you would see the color all the time. What do you think?  Please let me know in the comments. I just happen to have a 30 percent off coupon to Kohl's this month.

Legos, Legos, Legos!

About 9 months ago when we were getting our house ready for the market there was one project that I knew needed to happen to have any concept of clean in the boys room. Yes, all those Lego bricks needed a decent storage system that worked! Our original system was to small and therefore not working. There were always Legos on the floor because there was no place to put them.

This is the  system we started with.

The other problem we have is one son wants all the pieces separated by color and size, while the other one wants to keep all of his sets together. I began searching for ideas online and came across this one. Perfect! The only problem is we were getting ready to put our house on the market and move. I didn’t want to go buy anything new so I worked with what we had on hand.

Enter storage solution number two. All of the Legos were moved to the basement and organized by color. We kept some of the sets together and combined some into what we call the “everything” Legos. Those would be all the random pieces I have been collecting for my children since before they were born. This is a photo after we moved some of the Legos back into their room. Sadly I don’t think I took any photos of it while in the basement.

You can see that we had labels but they had all ready outgrown their homes and needed extra drawers.

This is what the basement currently has. It is the Power Miners, Atlantis, and Ninjago sets. I plan to do some rearranging on these shelves but that will come in time.

Now 9 months later we are not moving as our house didn’t sell.  It’s coming on to winter and our basement has no heat, and the make-do system was not always easy to work with according to my Lego builders. At the same time Jen from I heart organizing! posts about her organizing system. The same one I had been eyeing. That was all it took! Last weekend while the boys were at a camp out the girls and I took a little trip to IKEA! Out went the Expedit shelf and Sterlite storage containers and in came the new!

We are not finished as nothing is labeled but the system is amazing! The units are the Trofast system from IKEA. The only problem we have is that by having to keep it upstairs there is not room for all of the Legos we own. Some of them still reside in the basement. I hope to get those into Trofast drawers the next time I make a trip the the store.

Each color has it’s own bin and there is one for wheels, clear pieces, and mini-figures.

We also have two bins for castle and city pieces. I plan to get the bigger bins for the sets when I get more. The smaller ones are overflowing.

As you can see we still have some work to do. The books all need a nice box to go into. I used to store them in binders but some of the newer sets come with booklets that were to big for a page protector and the smaller ones tend to fall out. I think a box will solve all of those problems.

I like the fact that there is some display space on top of the storage units. Not enough for my boys but it works for now. Perhaps I might do something with the space between the top shelf and storage. This is what it looks like most of the time as my boys play with their Legos every day.

Now I just need to find the time to label them. In the meantime we are loving out new storage!

Linking up to 

It’s done.

 

(The last roses from the garden)

Well it’s official, we took our house off the market. We still haven’t moved anywhere. It’s to the point where we laugh about it as no one believes us anymore. We have been attempting to move somewhere for TWO years. Two very long years. Transition is not a fun place to be. It has so many limitations and questions and waiting. But that apparently is a lesson we are learning, that waiting can sometimes take a different turn than expected. Last month our cat died and we can’t get a new one until after we move, more waiting. Our fish died, sorry no more fish either. Decorating? Forget about it, who wants to put more holes in the walls that I’ll just have to fill. Well, I’m tired of it , not so much for me, but for the children who don’t really remember any other life before the one here. They have done well and have taken our dreams and made them theirs. They know that there is a little farm out there somewhere for us, when the time is right. Patience is sometimes a hard pill to swallow.

So enough of the depressing and lugging dirty dishes around when there is a house showing. What? You haven’t done that before? Well, if your ever in a time crunch it is the perfect solution. Laundry baskets aren’t just meant for dirty laundry.  I should also mention that stuffing dirty laundry in the washer AND dryer also works really well.  Instant clean.

Since we are here for another good 6 months I thought I would move on and tackle some of those projects I had to put off. I have sewing spread out all over the dining room table. Pumpkins on the kitchen table, laundry on the floor, and toys in the hallway. For now it’s fun to leave it messy while in the middle of a project. I know me though, soon it will all be tidied up because really I don’t like messy.

I hope(and I say hope because I haven’t been very consistent with blogging) to blog more and share all the the goings on around here again. Then in the spring when the snow is melted we will put the house back on the market and pray that we are one step closer in this waiting process.