Materials:
– 1×4″ board in your choice of length.  Mine is about 24 inches long.
– Paint
– 1/2″ screws
– Pipe Clamps (I think they were size 36)
– Paint or wood stain (optional)
– Sawtooth picture hangers or 3″ screws
– Mason Jars (or knock offs)

Directions:
1.  Paint or stain your wood if you’d like.
2.  Use the 1/2″ screws to attach the pipe clamps to the board.
3.  Attach your picture hangers to the board or locate the studs in the wall and use the 3″ screws to attach the board to the wall.
4.  Tighten your jars into the pipe clamps.

It’s pretty easy and fairly basic.  As you can see, I modified the original design a bit… I took one pipe clamp and jar off the board completely.  Then I lined the pipe clamp that holds my hair dryer with felt to keep it from scratching up the plastic on my hair dryer.  Just hot glue a strip of felt inside the pipe clamp all the way around.  The cord tucks through and is out of reach of my incessantly grabby toddler.  The jars hold my “hot sticks” (as my preschooler calls them), the curling iron and the flat iron.  I love that I can drop them in the jars and I don’t have to worry about them warping the counter or melting combs or anything like that.  They are up and out of reach and can safely cool off in the glass jars.  This DIY project turned re-purpose has been a success for the last seven months and I don’t intend to change it any time soon.

This post was written by Krista and originally appeared on While He Was Napping.
If you’d like to get more While He Was Napping, you can find me here:

If you missed the intro to Project: Get Organized- Find Order I’ll break it down for you real quick.  Basically, instead of a New Year’s Resolution, I set a theme for the next year – this year.  The theme: Get organized and find some order for our chaotic lives.  Just in time for this new goal, Stephanie at Modern Parents Messy Kids has released an awesome e-book.  Project Organize Your Entire Life: The Quick Start Guide is chock-full of amazing tips, tricks and pointers on where to start and how to wrangle a wild home.  This is exactly what I needed.  I have grandiose ideas, but often get burn out before I do much more than make a bigger mess.  Not so with POYEL: The Quick Start Guide.  It goes section by section and step by step.  Perfect!  She even talks about two kinds of home overhauls: the slow start or the big clean.  With my two boys, I’ll be taking the slow route and working during nap times and after bedtime.

The first section is all about toy rotation.  We need this BADLY at my house.  So, here we are.  Step one.  The toy sort.  This actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.  It took a little longer than I anticipated, but that was mostly because I kept getting interrupted with other things.  And having two curious little “helpers” didn’t actual help.  Sure my piles didn’t look so much like piles at times,  but we got through the sort phase.  Here’s how:

 

–  Constructive Play Toys.  These toys are blocks, Legos, our new Gizmo set, Monkey’s felt road and his wooden train set and other things that my boys actually build with.
–  Fantasy Play Toys.  Dress up clothes, cars and trucks, tool set, our LeapFrog shopping cart, ect.  Toys that can be played with in a variety of ways.
–  Games or Toys with Rules.  This includes Chutes and Ladders, Candy Land, Jenga, the bean bag toss and the like.
–  Constant Circulation Toys.  These are the toys that will never go into storage.  The things my boys really, really love.  Monkey has a couple of stuffed animals that he would definitely notice if they went MIA.  They will always be out.  As will some of his cars.  The kid loves those cars.

Each category got it’s own pile and I gathered every toy in the house I could find.  I will probably still find toys around, or even piece of different toys, but that’s why I like the 20 gallon totes.  It’s super easy to open them back up and reunite any stray pieces…

I’ve got more for you!  Get all the info on dividing and storing the toys in Toy Rotation: The Divide.

This post was written by Krista and originally appeared on While He Was Napping.
If you’d like to get more While He Was Napping, you can find me here:

If you missed the post earlier this morning about my New Year’s theme resolution, you can get all caught up on it HERE.  If you don’t want to read about our Christmas, skip down to the last paragraph.  My first step in Project: Get Organized and Find Order was to come up with a game plan.  I have a really bad tendency to overload myself with projects and to-do lists and then I suffer burn out and disappointment, followed by lack of motivation because I never seem to get anything done!

Over at Modern Parents Messy Kids, Stephanie felt similarly one night in early spring last year and wrote an amazing post about how she had tamed her demons, her house was perfectly organized, her chore schedule was planned to a T, and her menu plan never failed.  Her children has reliable routines and her life was in complete harmony.  And then she admitted it was all a dream, but Project Organize Your Entire Life had been born.  It was a worldwide phenomena that spread like wide fire!  Apparently, there are lots of people craving order who don’t quite know how to get it.  I know that’s the boat I am in.

Stephanie has since been putting together an e-book on where to start in order to achieve more order in your life.  Total score, right?  I’ve started working my way through the pages and, let me tell you, it’s a fabulous collection of hints and helpful tips on where to start your journey to organization and order.  I am loving the section on toy rotation.  That is one of the first things I want to implement into our new routine.  Less toys in the house means less mess to clean up and less to trip over when I get Gator’s middle-of-the-night bottle.  Besides, my kids have some GREAT toys, but they have so many that they never spend much time with any one thing – leading to more mess (what 10.5 month-old cleans up after himself?!) and less quality play time.  I’ll let you in on how I’m going to do all this soon…

If you too have made the resolution to de-clutter and organize this year, you gotta check this out.  Stephanie has a sweet deal going on today!  If you’d like to try out POYEL: The Quick Start Guide, it is available now!  There was a great little part about her first project.  The laundry room of all places.  But it was something she could get accomplished while her little one napped one afternoon.  For a while, it was her happy place, even though no one else saw it regularly.  But, the best part of this guide is that she answers the question, “Where do I start?”  That is one of the hardest parts, for me anyway.

You can get POYEL: The Quick Start Guide in PDF form or try out the Kindle version.  It normally costs $6.99, but if you order before 12:59 EST on December 31, 2012 with the code “early” you can save an extra 25%!  Total deal, just saying.

Well, I’m off to do some toy sorting… and buy some storage totes…  woo, what a par-tay, right?!  Happy New Year!  (Be safe!)  And bring it, 2013!  I’m ready!

This post was written by Krista and originally appeared on While He Was Napping.
If you’d like to get more While He Was Napping, you can find me here: