Have a hard time keeping up with all of those bill due dates? Order a set of my bill pay stickers, and use them to mark when bill are due in your planner or on your calendar.

The set includes stickers for 38 common bills, plus blanks that you can customize. There are 12 of each sticker (567 stickers total), so one set is enough to get you through the year.

They’re available in my shop for $12, so that’s just $1 a month. If they help you avoid even one late fee, they’ll more than pay for themselves.

And if you haven’t already, be sure to print a copy of my bill pay checklist (it’s free). It’ll give you a place to check off your bills as you pay them.

I was in my pantry the other night pulling out ingredients for dinner, when I decided I just couldn’t take the mess any more. Ever since my kids started baking and cooking regularly, the pantry has just been out of control. They pull things out, and then they put them back in weird and random places.

Like the Sriracha and red wine vinegar on my baking shelf. Clearly that’s where those go, right? I mean, obviously that’s where I should look for them the next time I need them for a recipe.

Yeah, not so much.

Clearly it was time to rethink the way the pantry was organized. And by “rethink” I mean, “make it so painfully obvious where things go, so Mom won’t be tempted to eat anyone.”

So, that’s how I came to reorganize the pantry instead of making dinner. What can I say? Families who keep their pantries neat and orderly get homemade Pad Thai for dinner. Families who don’t get cereal.

Now, I’ve seen lots of pantry redos on the web where everything is in matching containers and looks like it jumped off the page of a magazine, but spoiler alert: this isn’t that kind of redo. Frankly, the thought of forking over the money for 30 matching containers pains me. So, this is the kind of redo that happens when you decide you’re going to fix things using just what you have on hand.

Ready to see how things turned out? Take a look. [Read more…]

A few years back we bought an antique workbench to use in our kitchen, and that pretty much took care of our junk drawer woes.

See how big the junk drawer is? There’s plenty of space for everything. Except batteries, evidently. Because no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t find a good way to store them. [Read more…]

Buying ahead saves you time and money, but it only really works, if you have a way to keep everything organized. I’ve made a lot of strides in that department over the years, but it’s something I’m still working on. Something I will probably always be working on. Because life evolves, and your organizational systems have to continue to evolve with it.

I can always tell when I’ve come up with the right organizational solution because things just seem to stay neat and orderly on their own. That’s definitely been the case with the binder system that I created last January. It’s so easy to file papers now that everyone in the house just does it. And they actually put things in the right place. That part is always shocking for a mom.

But there are other areas of our home that aren’t as organized as I’d like them to be. My gift closet is one of those areas. [Read more…]