In this video, I show you how to organize recipes: the demonstration includes binders, boxes, and some of my favorite children’s cookbooks. My daughter loves to cook and wants to start her own recipe collection.
If your recipe cards are jammed and you can’t pull out a card without pulling out a whole section of cards, it’s time to re-organize your recipes. One way you can do this is to get a specially designed recipe binder that is similar to a photo album, but it has dividers for breads, meats, desserts, and other common categories you would find in a cookbook. You can get these recipe binders in most book stores or online.
If you are low on money and want to create your own binder, all you need is a three-ring binder and some plastic sheet protectors. The thing I love about this way of organizing recipes is that you can tear out a recipe page from your favorite magazine and slide the whole page into the sheet protector. You might want to have a recipe binder like this in addition to your recipe box or whatever other method you use for organizing your recipes.
I showed you some of my favorite children’s cookbooks in the video, and the reason I love these cookbooks is that they are addressed to children and easy for children to use. If you can get your children to enjoy cooking at a young age, you will be instilling skills that will help them to survive for the rest of their lives!
If you are wondering how to organize a window seat, here is a tutorial for how to section off the area with baskets and bins. The large area inside a window seat is perfect for stacking folded blankets or games in boxes. But what if you want to store other items in the window seat, including smaller objects?
Square baskets are ideal for maximizing the space inside a window seat, and the baskets look fabulous. You can place similar items in each basket. For example, in the video I show you the electronics kit and extra wires and other electronics equipment placed all in one basket. You can further contain the items by placing wires in a plastic bag inside the basket, so that the wires aren’t sprinkled everywhere.
If you have so many games that you have trouble shutting your cupboards, you can keep the game boards, stacking them. Then place all the pieces for each game in plastic bags, and label each game with a black permanent marker. Click here to find out other ways to organize games in cupboards and drawers.
Don’t forget that you can also stack baskets and bins on top of each other, to store even more items in your window seat.
Make sure that if you are installing a new window seat in your home, you use the space under it for storage. Have the carpenter place a hinge on the top so that you can open and close the top. Or you could open the window seat from the front, like a cupboard. The important thing to remember when organizing the items in your house is to not waste space.
Here is the video tutorial on how to organize a window seat:
Decorating your daughter’s room can be great fun when you string lights from the ceiling and make a gorgeous vanity. If you want to make your daughter’s room lovely, the first thing you’re going to want to do is to take everything out of the room and paint the walls a beautiful color that your daughter loves. My daughter happens to love the color pink. You might want to coordinate this with a bedspread and pillows that you will choose for the bed.
You will want to make some curtains. Curtains can be super easy to make. I do not like sewing, and I’m not good at it whatsoever. So you can do this, too. Get a piece of gorgeous cloth that goes with the bedspread and wall colors. Hem it all the way around. (Actually, you can iron the edges down, then use fabric glue for no sewing!) Then loop it and sew it across the top (or use more fabric glue.) The curtain rod goes through the tunnel that you’ve created on that one end. As you can see in the video, the colors of the wall and curtains were the exact same colors in the bedspread, even though I got them at different stores on separate days. Take a small pillow with you in the car. Then walk into the fabric store, showing the cashier that the pillow is yours, and you want to match it. They will let you go in and get the precise shade you need.
You can add a sweet canopy over the bed. If you can’t find one inexpensively, you can make one yourself with a hoola hoop and gauzy fabric. Attach it with a hook to the ceiling. Your daughter should be able to see it above her head when she is lying down on her bed.
Now you want to make a unique vanity for your daughter’s room. This is the piece de resistance of the bedroom, and it will help your daughter brush her hair so that it’s not looking stringy all the time. First hang up a mirror. Then screw a long basket under the mirror with two screws. This will hold all the brushes, combs, and hair clips that your daughter has. You can get a pencil holder for containing the brushes and combs. You can get other items from an office supply store that can be used for organizing desk drawers. Small containers help to divide head bands, pony tails, ribbons, and clips. If you have no money, you can spray paint some small boxes (like check book boxes) black. Wait overnight for the box to dry before putting it into the basket. Find a vanity chair, or spray paint a stool to match the mirror and other items in the bedroom. And don’t forget to hang up a string of silk flowers, hooking them around your mirror like a garden bower.
Last but not least, I hung up some Chinese lanterns across the top of my daughter’s room. They were actually two strings of Christmas lights surrounded by tissue paper boxes. I got a white extension cord and ran it behind the doll house and curtain to the ceiling, hooking it into the ceiling at regular intervals. Now her room looks magical, like a beautiful garden party whenever she turns off the light.
For more ways to decorate and organize your home, take a look at how I transformed a woman’s disorganized homeschool room in Homeschool Room Makeover.
How do you share a closet with one or two other people? How do you find enough space to hang everyone’s clothing? And how can you keep track of whose clothing is whose? These simple tips will help transform your closet nightmare into a usable space to store your children’s clothing.
Tips for Organizing a Shared Closet:
Use a different color hanger for each person. When choosing a color, don’t choose light blue and white, because they are too similar. Don’t choose dark blue and black for the same reason. Choose contrasting colors like black and white.
If all you have is boys sharing the closet, there is no reason for the bar to be so high. You can either have two bars, or put shelving underneath the bar for further storage.
Pare down to what you need to hang up. Don’t own a million clothes. Your children will never wear more than 10-20 outfits anyway. All the others will just sit there because they are too scratchy or ugly or ho-hum to your children. Ask your children which clothing they hate, and try to eliminate those to avoid tears when you’re hurrying your children up on Sunday mornings for church. (That’s all you need is for church people to twist their heads to gawk at your children’s tear-stained faces. Avoid this scenario. Get rid of unwanted clothing.)
If you have a suit, hang the pants, the shirt, the vest, the tie, and the jacket on one hanger. Get rid of all ties except for the best one for each suit.
If you get rid of most of your clothing that you never wear, you will have plenty of space to hang up sweaters, which take up way too much space in a drawer. Hang the sweater up with the turtleneck shirt you will wear under it. This makes it easier for your child to pull it out and wear it, rather than trying to hunt down the shirt that needs to go under it.
Put the long-sleeve shirts together, the short-sleeve shirts together, the sweaters together, and so on.
Have all the clothing facing one direction so that you can see the fronts of the shirts as you flick through them.
In this video, I show you tips on organizing a shared closet, so that you can see what I’m talking about:
Hi! I'm Susan Evans. I speak at homeschool conferences about hands-on learning and run a huge unit study membership site. I also speak at women's retreats on the topic of prayer.
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