Like many of you across the country - we are having weird weather. This time last week it was 50 degrees, this weekend it was 80. What does a girl do when the seasons start to change? Spring Cleaning! Not normal spring cleaning of course - I didn't get out a vacuum or dust rags or anything crazy like that! Instead I:
purged my Tupperware
cleaned out my closet
organized my Pinterest boards
While this may seem a little less motivated than say - repainting a bathroom or replanting the front yard, these piddly projects actually ended up making a few changes of their own. Who knew?
Where the @#$% are all the Tupperware lids?
This is a phrase I hear at least once a week from Don, usually about 5am, usually when I am still in bed and he thinks he is talking to himself. Don has started taking his lunch to work in recent months, which has helped us in a couple of ways. We save money, it encourages me to cook more and in bigger portions so we have leftovers, and it is much healthier than grabbing fast food or something out of a vending machine every day. Even though the cupboard where we keep the plastic tubs started out looking fabulously organized - this is what it looked like on Saturday.
It took us less than 10 minutes to get everything out, match tops to bottoms, toss out the mismatched pieces, and put it all back in the cupboard. While I'm sure it won't stay that way - it reminded us that it only takes a few minutes of working together to make life a little easier.
You're not in high school anymore (or needing to wear power suits).
Don and I met my family Saturday night for dinner at Brasa in Raleigh. Incredible meal - wear elastic-waist pants and prepare to take a meat-induced nap afterwards. Anyhoo - I needed something "nice" to wear, and all of my warm weather clothes were in the guest room closet. I was dragging them out one by one - picking something out, trying it on, deciding it wasn't the right thing, dragging out another piece...I finally got so fed up that I pulled out EVERYTHING, took it in to our bedroom, plopped it on the bed, and tried on every single piece of summer clothing I own (including - ugh - bathing suits). I took a REAL look at each piece - did I wear it last summer? does it go with other stuff I own? do I feel comfortable in it? - and got rid of almost 20 items. I was so motivated that I went back through my winter clothes, tried on everything I hadn't worn in the last three months, and got rid of even more. The power suit I bought "just in case"? Gone. The skirt I've had since high school that is too tight in all the wrong places? Out the door. The sweater my MIL gave me that I would never wear but have held on to for three years? Donated. I thought long and hard about the "I plan to lose 10 pounds this year" story we all tell ourselves, and realized that keeping clothes that might fit "someday" just made me feel bad every time I went to get dressed. While it didn't always feel good to look in the mirror (my butt has gotten a little larger since last summer) - it DOES feel good to finally have a closet full of clothes I feel comfortable wearing out of the house. Getting dressed just got a whole lot easier - I even organized my closet by color!
Using Pinterest for good
Jessica Turner (The Mom Creative) shared a great blog post last week about using Pinterest.
While I am already pretty good about tips #2-10, tip #1 really struck a chord with me. I use Pinterest as part of my job (how lucky am I?) but I only had six boards, so I spent a LOT of time looking for pins I needed and wishing I was more organized. I brought my ipad with me on our drive up to Raleigh and was able to organize about 90% of my pins in an hour and a half - and learned a LOT in those 90 minutes. A few tips in addition to Jessica's:
Organize your boards AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. I only have about 600 pins, but I still wish I had done it sooner. Don't feel like you need to do it all in one sitting - if we hadn't been driving up to Raleigh I would have done it gradually over time.
100 pins maximum per board is a good number. When I started this weekend my "I create" board had over 250 pins. I created some new boards and moved pins around, and when my I create board had about 100 pins remaining I was able to scroll through and feel like I had a good grasp of what it contained. Having no more than 100 pins also makes it easier to find (and delete) duplicate pins. I had this recipe pinned FIVE TIMES. Five!
Look through your board before you start moving pins around. I have a board called "food glorious food" - and I wanted to separate out sweet/dessert items from everything else. I had about 120 pins on my board and was almost halfway through moving my dessert pins over to a new board when I realized that more than HALF of my pins were desserts! It would have saved a LOT of time if I had just renamed the board "desserts" and moved the other pins somewhere else.
Be prepared to learn something about yourself. I'm not talking about life changing lessons here...but you never know what you might discover! Don and I love weekend breakfasts, and unless we have our nephews over (in which case we have pancakes) we ALWAYS make something savory. I never thought anything about it until I created a "breakfast" board - and all but two of the pins were for sweet foods! Looks like we might try something new next weekend!
Happy Spring to all - if you are on Pinterest I'd love to check out your boards! Share your link in the comments section here on on my FB page - let's inspire each other!
Thanks for the tip Andrea...the lids are going to be our downfall! I'm following you now - woohoo!
Posted by: Beth Kingston | March 19, 2012 at 11:41 AM
I'm laughing at your "Tupperware dilemma". Don't all households deal with that? I finally came up with a solution that works for us. I got one of those large plastic baskets and stacked the bowls & the lids in there together. While they aren't always nice & neat, at least they are contained and don't fall all over the floor when I open the cabinet door. I love Pinterest. Can't wait to see your boards! :)
http://pinterest.com/andreaallis/
Posted by: Andrea | March 19, 2012 at 10:37 AM