Tidy Brown Wren, bringing order to your nest

So, if you're following along with me in the process of organizing and cleaning your entire house this year, we'll be working on the bathroom in February together.  Well, not really together.  I mean you work on your bathroom and I'll work on mine. I thought I would use some photos of bathrooms I've staged for my clients over the past year or two.   One of the things you will notice about all of these bathrooms is that I use all white linens and light colored accessories.   You'll want to work on only one bathroom in your home at a time.   As usual, you'll want to check out each bathroom and do an assessment.    Check out this post for the details. Staged bathroom in a home for sale. After you've done an assessment of the bathroom it's time to roll up your sleeves and get to work.    1. Remove everything from the cabinet or drawer. Wipe out the cabinet/drawer and line with contact paper if desired. ...

So. . . you've set a New Year's resolution to organize and deep clean your house this year.  Sure, sure - you said that same thing last year, but this year you really mean it.  But now it's almost the end of January and you don't know where to start.   Well, today's the day.   I'll be blogging each month about an area to work on .  We'll take one area per month.  Don't try to do more than that one area a month and overwhelm yourself  because you'll want to quit.   And quitters never have clean homes! Ready?  Let's go! In January, you should work on the area where you enter your home.  Front door?  Back door?  It doesn't matter.  We'll just call it your home's entrance.   1.  Evaluate what you need in the area.  Think through your daily routine of entering and exiting.  Think about what you need to help your family get what they need and keep it organized. ...

Here's our last month of Monday Motivations for 2012.  If you've been following for the whole year, you would have cleaned and organized every room in your home and even your car.  That's quite an accomplishment and deserves a prize - I'm grabbing some chocolate!  You know how this works. . . below is a collection of posts from December 2011 for you to read at your leisure.  Just be sure your leisurely reading doesn't get in the way of getting some work done.     Analyzing Your Dining Room: How did your dining room function for you during the Thanksgiving holiday? Does it need to be organized before Christmas? For the month of December we'll check out how to organize and spruce up the dining room. This week we'll do some brain storming about the purpose of the room Next week we'll get our hands dirty with purging and rearranging. The following week we'll look at storage solutions. Our last week will cover deco...

I'm reposting a post from last year about refurbishing your collection of ornaments.  I've added a few notes which you'll find in italics . This was the first year, in many years, that Hubs and I decorated our tree by ourselves. Our daughters are married and have homes and families of their own. Our son is away at Marine training (but will hopefully be home for a few days near Christmas).  Said son is now a Marine Reservist while finishing college and working two other jobs so he still wasn't home to help with the tree decorating. Without the kids around to fight over ornaments or step on each other's toes, the house was strangely quiet, except for the Christmas music playing in the background. What I noticed when opening our box of ornaments was that several of them needed a bit of TLC. Over the years, I haven't really done much with the ornaments except unwrap, hang, unhang, re- wrap, and re-pack. I decided that this ...

This past week I had a whole day to stay home and take care of household things.  Time to "putter" is a luxury these days and I enjoyed every minute of it.  A good portion of my day was spent in the kitchen and laundry areas and I was able to make up several batches of homemade cleaning solutions.  Since November is the month I've chosen for laundry room organizing, I thought this might be the  perfect time to share my recipes with you. If you want to try these recipes, please test them out on a small area first to make sure your home and the cleaning recipes will play nicely together.  Laundry Detergent: 1 cup grated bar soap (I use Fels Naptha) 1/2 cup washing soda (not baking soda) 1/2 cup borax I make a triple batch and store it in a canister in my cupboard.  I use 2 Tbl. per load. Dishwasher Detergent: 1 cup baking soda (yup, the baking kind) 1 cup borax 1/3 cup Lemi shine crystals (I buy it at Walmart) Mix toget...

November is here and that means time to organize the laundry area.  I've collected all of the laundry organizing posts from last year and combined them here to get you motivated.    Putting Your Thoughts Together About Laundry Room Organizing I've chosen November as the month to cover the topic of organizing the laundry room. source So, this week is all about deciding what you'll use your laundry room for. Here are some questions you'll want to ask yourself: 1. How many people use this room? 2. What types of laundry are handled in this room? (whites, lights, darks, linens, delicates, dry cleaning, diapers) 3. Do you hand wash any laundry? 4. Do you hang laundry up to dry? 5. How many loads do you do in a week? 6. What types of laundry products do you need to store? 7. Do you need space to hold dirty laundry until it is washed? 8. Where is clean laundry folded? 9. Where is ironing done? ...

I've enjoyed the email conversations I've been having with several of you, my readers,  about cleaning out garages. It seems that the universal dilemma of garage owners is how to clean out the garage and keep it cleaned out. Garages were designed to store things.  True, originally they were designed to store vehicles, but we tend to store more than vehicles in them.  We store holiday decorations and tools in them.  We also use them as project spaces and sporting spaces and gardening project spaces.  No wonder they tend to look like a mess all the time. I can't claim to have a neat looking garage all of the time.  What I can claim is that I'm able to clean it up pretty quickly because I don't let it stay too messy for too long.  That's really the trick.  Everything has a place where it lives.  When everything has a place to live, it doesn't take long to send everything home where it belongs.  About once a mont...

  Join us for Monday Motivation - An opportunity to go through your whole house (and car too) in a year, organizing and cleaning the whole way.  October is the month to clean out the garage.   This post is a collection of the Monday Motivations from last year .   Getting Your Garage Under Control How many of you are afraid to open your garage door? How many of you are parking your car outside of your garage because there's too much stuff stored in there? I've only met two people in my whole life who had neat and tidy garages - and I'm not one of them. I can clean up our garage fairly quickly, but it never stays perfectly organized and tidy all of the time. That's just how life rolls. So let get started. . . 1. Make a plan - decided on what you will use the garage for. Will you need to park your vehicle in it? Will you need space for sporting or yard equipment? Do you need storage for kid's toys or hol...