Functionality and Organizing | Operation Home

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know that I love and use Pinterest frequently. I’m not an every day pinner (for time reasons only), but the pins that I do pin are pinned for a reason (“pin” 4 times in one sentence. Yeah!). Over the years, I’ve tried many things I’ve seen on there, so I thought I’d review some of the wins and fails I’ve encountered. I’ve linked up the related pins in case you want to check them out yourselves. Just know that these are the pins that I decided to try, that happened to work for me (or not). I’m in no way an expert on these topics. These were just my personal experiences, so I thought I’d share. With that said, in no particular order….

Wins:

1. Cleaning the microwave by cooking diluted vinegar. I LOVE this. It makes cleaning the microwave almost a pleasure. Almost.

2. Keeping the shower clean with dawn dish soap + vinegar in a dish scrubber. This works so well. It keeps our glass shower door streak-free and gorgeous with minimal time spent. I literally just keep the scrubber in the shower and wipe down the glass and rinse before I get out of the shower each day. It takes one minute, tops! The same mixture makes my sinks sparkle, as well.

3. Vinegar to kill weeds. Kills ’em dead. Just don’t get it close to any vegetation you want to keep. I mainly use it for the weeds that come up in the cracks in our driveway or walkway.

4. Cleaning glass with hydrogen peroxide. I just screw a spray nozzle right into the bottle of peroxide (it loses it’s effectiveness when exposed to light, so keeping it in its original container is best). You’ll never see a more streak-free mirror… Just let it dry thoroughly before you judge. At first it looks streaky, then it fades.

5. Using chalk to remove grease stains from clothing. Check out this post for more details on that experience (which may or may not have involved a seductive butter container and weird, completely random doodles).

6. Recipes!!! Holy RECIPES!!! I have my “Food Glorious Food To Try” board which are the recipes I’ve got on reserve for a rainy day. Then, once I’ve tried a recipe, I move it to my “Recipe Box: Tried and True” board along with commentary for how it turned out and any recipe modifications made. This way, I can always go back and have all the details I need, right there at my fingertips.

7. Using tape to more easily determine placement of wall hangings. I demonstrated this technique in this post, but have used it many times since. It totally removes the guesswork and measuring needed to hang tricky objects.

8. Using upside-down command hooks to hang door wreaths from inside. This idea was carried out when I hung our frame wreath. The wreath was up for a good 10 months before I removed it and this hanging system worked perfectly the entire time.

9. Hemming jeans easily and undetectably. This is one of my favorites!! It’s a simple process and you seriously CANT TELL. It looks like the jeans were born that way. I just do this by hand… No machine needed.

10. ….

(Why, yes. I totally censored this cake with a sweet feathered hat. This blog is nothing if not random.)

I made a similar version of this cake for Joey. If you’re having a not-so-stellar “attitude week”, cake + apology makes everything better. He thought this was hilarious. (P.S. This link contains the uncensored cake. You’ve been warned)

Fails:

1: Using a pumice stone to remove fabric pilling off clothes. It really just made my shirt look worse.

2. Layering glitter nail polish between red for a neat iridescent color. Mine turned out looking like a lumpy red mess. I wish I would’ve taken a picture. It would’ve made a great “Nailed It!”. Maybe I just used the wrong stuff.

3. ANY of the hair style tutorials I’ve tried… Apparently, I possess ZERO hair coordination.

4. Using baking soda on my face for microdermabrasion. It left a gritty film that seemed to take a while to go away. I’ve since deleted the pin from my board, but here’s a link to the pin if you wanna check it out.

So, definitely more wins than losses (unless I’m blocking them from my memory. Which I might be. I’m sneaky like that.). Aside from this list, I’ve acquired infinite amounts of inspiration by scrolling through the eye-candy world of Pinterest. In home decor, fashion, organizing techniques… you name it. Plus, if I’m working on a DIY project and get stumped, it’s my go-to reference for tutorials and advice. In any case, I’ve definitely picked up some good tips by utilizing Pinterest and will continue to share my experiences as I have them.

So, have you guys tried anything that you’d like to share? What wins and fails have you experienced?

I need to take Claritin D more often.

It makes me organize. It’s like me + Claritin D = organizational soulmates.

Of course, when it wears off I’m all…

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But for the first few hours, I’m like an organizing, calorie-burnin’ machine of hyperness.

After organizing No Man’s Land, the craft closet and Lucas’s room, I had every intention of taking a little break. Then, I caught The Black Plague (or maybe that’s just me being dramatic) and thought I was dying. So, I took a Claritin D out of desperation and went from a useless lump on the sofa to the flippin’ energizer bunny for about 2 hours time before the germies caught back up to me, rendering me once again completely useless.

In my drug-induced haze, I decided to tackle the laundry room. I’ve never posted about this space before (aside from a few pics in our house tour), so let’s start from the beginning(ish). After we moved in, I painted our beige walls with a blue-grey Oops paint and then snapped this picture….

But, there was a problem (Imagine the following scenario with the top shelf ONLY like in the picture above.)…

The original shelf and cabinet were way too tall for my vertically-challenged self (and that’s me on my tip-toes, ya’ll).

So, we DIYed two additional shelves by having 1×10 unfinished shelf boards cut down to size at Home Depot. I primed and painted everything with leftover trim paint left by our builder. We used cute ikea brackets for the middle shelf and cheapo L brackets on the lower to allow us to get the bottom shelf as close to the washer and dryer as possible (they’re low enough that you can’t see them easily anyways)….

This get-up worked much better for us, but over time, the room turned into this…

Just full o’ crapola.

That nasty looking stuff in the large beverage dispenser is old laundry detergent. Once upon a time ago, I decided to be brilliant and poured my detergent in there. I’d seen the idea on Pinterest, and thus, figured it HAD to be genius. Alas, not so much. Turns out the detergent we use looks completely nasty. People often asked (with expressions of poorly-suppressed dubiousness) what the urine-looking substance in the jar was. Then, after a while, the detergent started to separate. I wonder if it’s like hydrogen peroxide where it loses it’s potency if not sealed from light or something. Now, I know that laundry detergent comes in opaque containers for good reason. Thus, ours will forever stay in the store-bought jugs. And Pinterest is not always right. It was a noble try, though.

Instead of being a grown-up and cleaning out the jar in a timely manner, I decided it simply pretend it didn’t exist by hiding it behind closed doors. Gosh, I’m gross. So, it was time. I finally cleaned out the jar thoroughly and freed up a ton of glorious cabinet space.

I went through all the baskets and rid ourselves of unused junk. Most of the stuff just really needed to be put back in their respective rooms. The laundry room had pretty much become a catch-all drop-zone of laziness. Then, I gave everything a thorough wipe down with my water/vinegar spray. I even went so far as to magic erase the smudges off the washer and dryer. Spic n’ span. Oh, yeah.

Then, I put stuff back in ways that made much more sense.

Now that the cabinets were clean, I had room for detergent, bleach, etc, so they’re no longer out in the open. I decided to reuse a short glass cylinder for storage of smaller items instead of a basket because, as previously demonstrated, I’m short. And could never see what was in the solid basket that was in there before, so I figured clear storage would be best. I left most of the top shelf empty for when we restock paper towels.

Here’s a full view of the newly clean space….

One basket now stores sidewalk chalk, bubbles, water balloons and other outdoor toys for Lucas, one basket holds batteries, and a third holds things like sunblock and other odds and ends. The top baskets are empty for growth.

As far as I’m concerned, leaving the decor as-is isn’t an option. The differing brown tones kill me. I’ve said various versions of this statement in SO many other posts…. Mismatching brown undertones is one of my biggest pet-peeves and it’s an ongoing issue in this house. Our last house had a very Tuscan color scheme with browns, taupes, greens, reds, etc. and we had a huge mudroom with floor to ceiling shelves. I’d purchased tons of baskets to organize them, which is why I have SO many baskets leftover in various tones of brown. I refuse to buy new ones because that’s just a waste, so I’m reusing what I’ve got.

Now, I’ll let you in on a little secret… I’ve already made the decor changes. I’ll have another post up soon with details. I just didn’t want this post to reach novel-length, so I decided to split it in half.

To round out our mudroom tour, we have my DIY pear art (the inspiration for which I got here) that I completed pre-blog, along with some fun paperclip hooks that I found on clearance at Target.

On this tiny wall, I simply hung an old mail sorter with hooks for keys, sunglasses, wallets, etc.

For the most part, our laundry/mudroom works really well for us. I’d like to figure out some shoe storage solutions in the future, though. And possibly some hanging storage behind the door to the kitchen (not shown) for brooms, mops, etc.

In any case, I’d say this organizational stint was a success being that Joey’s first statement upon seeing it was “Wow! Who knew our mudroom was so big?” (Itsnot. Butthanksbabe.). 🙂

So, what kind of organization projects have you guys got going on? Any mudroom revamps? Anybody else enjoy the effects of Claritin D? 🙂