spring cleaning {part one}.

Y'all. Can I first start by saying that I know I have been so bad about posting lately?! Excuses, excuses, but in the past week, the muffins had their big research project due, we were busily preparing for Open House, and it was the week leading up to Spring Break. Excuse A + Excuse B + Excuse C = mayhem.

But all of that is behind us now because it's the lovely break of spring and I am in spring cleaning h.e.a.v.e.n.! I have so many plans for us, y'all! After this week, we are all going to be spotlessly cleaned and ready for all things spring! Most of this week's posts are inspired by Anna Moseley over at 'Ask Anna'. If you don't already love her blog - you should. She has fabulous posts about how to clean everything around your house (even the stuff that helps us clean our humble abodes). Genius, y'all.

So my first spring cleaning project was to tackle our Dyson vacuum. Anna has such an easy-to-follow blog about cleaning your Dyson, so she really held my hand all the way through this yucky process (yes, it was major yuck). You should know that both Dyson and Anna recommend you clean your Dyson thoroughly every 6 months. Slap my wrist, because in my 1.5 years of Dyson ownership, I have NEVER cleaned her! Poor nugget.

Let's get going! I started out by emptying out the Dyson canister and removing the attachments from the body of the vacuum.

I placed the attachments straight into the dishwasher,

...and got to work on the canister! Y'all do you SEE how dirty it is?! Vom.

I placed the canister in the sink, and separated the yellow and black top from the clear canister...

...by pressing this grey button right next to the red latch that allows you to empty the canister.

I rinsed out the clear canister with water and then used a mild dish soap to wash it very well - embarrassingly, there was so much dust, the soap turned black! So glad I'm doing this!

After washing the clear canister, I ran water over the grey filter to rinse it thoroughly.

I then removed the two filters from the top and side of the body of the vacuum (labeled A and B on my vacuum) and held them both under running water until the water ran clear.

I set all of the pieces out to dry for at least 48 hours to ensure that everything is completely dry!

Next, I moved on to the brushes.

In order to access the brushes, I first located the lock/unlock screws on the bottom of my vacuum (they are grey, plastic "screws" that should be in a horizontal "locked" position before you start cleaning).

I turned the three screws to the vertical position, so that I could remove the plastic cover.

After removing the protective plastic cover, I was horrified at the state of my brushes!

Could my floors BE anymore disgusting?! Ah! Now here's where I had to get down and dirty. Everything was wound so tightly around the brushes, I had to use scissors to cut the thread, hair, etc. so that I could unwrap them from the cylindrical brushes. I told y'all it was disgusting!

But my "down and dirty efforts" paid off, because look at how clean the brushes are now!

I also rinsed the plastic cover off with water - it was surprisingly dusty as well!

• While this project took about an hour to complete, all of the work was extremely easy! Dyson makes it SO easy to disassemble the parts so that everything can be cleaned very well.
• Now that my cleaning tool is actually clean, our little abode can actually be cleaned properly! Hallelujah!

Happy Spring Break, y'all!

"teacher edition" overload.

Does anyone else's stomach drop when you hear the words "new textbook adoption"? Forget about having to learn an entirely new set-up and approach to utilizing the new textbook's content, that can be learned in training. I'm talking about dealing with the boxes and boxes and boxes of new materials that are about to start bombarding your classroom door. About this time last year, my stomach dropped. We had just adopted a new English/Language Arts textbook system. I call it a system because this new adoption was far beyond anything I had seen before. I kid you not, 12 (count 'em) t-w-e-l-v-e boxes (and those boxes were no petite flowers either) showed up at my door about a week before school was out. Fantastic. I thought I had gotten the materials for our entire grade level - you can imagine my shock when I found out it was all for little, ol' me.

Our new system is fabulously thorough, but it has a TON of materials. We have six reader textbooks for each student, six smaller, desk readers for each student, 22 big books, six teacher edition textbooks, a box of blackline masters, a box of vocabulary and retelling cards, and four tubs of leveled readers. The textbooks and small readers are easy enough to store and pull when I need them. My biggest issue was with the boxes of blackline masters, vocabulary cards, and retelling cards.

First of all, the boxes took up a great amount of space. Usually, one box would fit on my bookshelf while one had to sit on the floor or on our reading table.

The other problem was that I was having to search through two separate boxes to find each day's lesson's materials for each reading group. I would first find the blackline masters to see if I wanted to use anything for our reading lesson...



...and then I would search for the day's vocabulary, sight word, and retelling cards in the other box...

The blackline masters were at least divided by lesson! The cards, on the other hand, were all jumbled together making planning and gathering materials nightmarish at best. After several weeks of struggling with our new materials, I finally decided it would make my life so much easier if I could just grab one folder per lesson and have all of the blackline masters and cards gathered in one place.

I took the two boxes and some file folders home one weekend expecting to have to spend my entire Saturday dividing all of the cards up into their respective lessons - imagine my shock when it only took me 45 minutes to accomplish my task!

In each lesson's folder, I placed the respective sight word cards,

vocabulary cards,

retelling cards,

and blackline masters.

So that all together, we had a lovely little array of each lesson's materials.

All of the materials were then neatly stacked, ready to be housed in a file folder.

I then placed all of the file folders into a SINGLE tub, and made a nice little label (inspired by Jen's coupon labels over at I Heart Organizing) for the tub. The one tub now fits perfectly on my bookshelf, next to my teacher edition textbooks.

• I have simplified my planning routine for our ELA and Guided Reading block. Rather than searching through two different boxes for a variety of materials, I simply pull one folder with all of the materials I will need!
• While the project seemed daunting, it only took about one hour, total, to accomplish.
• I have minimized the amount of space required to house all of our reading materials - by eliminating two very large boxes and replacing them with one small tub, I have freed up an entire bookshelf and some floor space!

bagging the luggage.

I don't know about y'all, but between Mr. Spouse and me, we have a piece of luggage for every single occasion. Overnight tote? Check. Rolly bag? Check. Computer case? Check. Backpack? Check. Small, medium, and large cosmetic bag? Check, check, and check. I mean, we act like travel the world daily or something. Don't get me wrong - different occasions call for different types of luggage, yes,  but once it's all in one space, it's just so bulky and space-consuming!

We tried to wrangle all of our luggage onto one shelf, but when we tried retrieving a single piece, we were constantly finding ourselves fearing for our lives and blocking falling luggage. Not O.K.

We had created two stacks: one for our soft-sided luggage...

...and one stack for our hard-sided luggage and excess duffle bags.

Obviously, before we could do any sort of organizing, we needed to prune our collection. We made a donation of a couple of excess backpacks and cosmetic bags and a duffle bag. We also needed to find a better place to store our rolling luggage where it would still be out of the way, but not take up as much usable space. So that with all things said and done, we ended up with one tub of luggage that is easily removed from the shelf making retrieving our luggage a much more enjoyable experience!

We absolutely love having all of our luggage consolidated into one tub, and are really enjoying the ease of getting out and putting away our bags! How do y'all store your luggage? 

march and christmas go hand-in-hand, duh.

Some of y'all were with me in January when I confessed that my Christmas cards were still sitting proudly atop our coffee table, and I was just then getting around to finding a way to store them. Little did you know that I would be getting even MORE pitiful when I confessed to you that we just started the month of March, spring's premiere month, and I still did not have my Christmas decorations stored properly. SHAME! 

Some of our Christmas goodies were haphazardly stored in a filing cabinet (yes, a filing cabinet!)...

...while others were gathering warm fuzzies underneath our guest bed!

Happy homes, they were not! But here was my dilemma (and yes, I understand that I should probably be medicated for fretting over such things), I really wanted my Christmas tub to match all of my other storage tubs. I am too color-conscious to approve clear, beautifully labeled tubs sitting next to red and green cardboard tubs. Further, as we discussed the other day, I was nervous that if I got Christmas-specific bins, they would discontinue the bins as soon as our collection started to grow. And we all know how I feel about mis-matched bins. 

I decided my best bet was to just get my standby, clear tubs and then find dividers to keep our ornaments safe. Since Christmas is so far gone, I could not find any ornament-specific, cardboard dividers, but I did think that I could make these drawer organizers from Container Store work.

The size of each compartment could be adjusted at any time, allowing me to make bigger and smaller compartments depending on ornament size. Further, the dividers came in two different heights, so I could get one set for my larger ornaments and one set for my small ornaments.

After putting together my taller dividers, I then began filling each compartment. You will notice that the dividers did not extend the width of my tub, so I just used that space for over-sized and excess ornaments and boxes.

To separate the layers, I simply cut a sheet of poster board in half, laid it on top of the dividers, and created my next level for my smaller ornament dividers.

I finally created a third layer with the other half of my poster board. On this top layer, I put all of my boxed ornaments, our Christmas cards, and our severely over sized ornaments.

Thus, creating a three-layered Christmas tub that fits perfectly on our little storage shelf!

Of course, no storage solution is complete without the perfect label...

 

• All of our Christmas decorations are now in one location that makes sense (no longer living underneath the bed).
• By using a universal, clear tub, we can be sure that as our collection grows, we can expand to more clear tubs and not have to worry about if our Christmas tubs have been discontinued each year.

How do you store your Christmas decorations? Are yours spread out throughout your house like ours were?