Busy weekend

It's nearly 10:00 p.m. on Sunday night and it's the first time I really had to sit down at the computer all weekend!

On Friday night, I was rather productive! The house has been such a mess, and it's hard to know where to start at times. So I picked a room and got to work! Of course, I picked one of the smallest rooms in the house - the laundry room.

Our laundry room is on the main level of our house, right off of the family room. In our first house, our laundry was in an icky part of the basement, and I really dislikes doing laundry because of it. When we moved to this house, I was thrilled to have the laundry right off of our main living area so that I could do laundry throughout the day!

The laundry room connects the family room to the garage. It also houses two closets. One is a regular "coat closet" - I use that to hold the vacuum, the clothing steamer and to hang all my clothes that need to have the wrinkles removed from them. I also store the kids' snow clothes in that closet as well. The other closet is our tiny pantry! There is no room in the kitchen for an actual pantry, but we are lucky to have this little space in the laundry room for food storage (it's funny to see people's reactions when my kids ask for a snack and I retreat to the laundry room!).

I scrubbed this little room from ceiling to floor on Friday! The laundry center is now neat and tidy and ready for more laundry (there's ALWAYS more laundry, right?). I also cleaned out the pantry- which was quite a big job! I am so happy that I have a good inventory of our grocery items now.

The rest of the weekend went by too quickly! I worked on Saturday morning, and we took a trip to my in-law's place on Saturday evening. They even agreed to feed the kids dinner so that Craig and I could go for a "grown up" dinner by ourselves! Hooray for Chicken Marsala!

Today I did some laundry, but spent the bulk of the day cleaning the garage. We have a tiny one-car garage attached to our house. My big minivan would never fit in it, and we have too many kids' toys and lawn equipment to be able to consider parking Craig's car in it, so it's basically a storage shed. It was a MESS, but I managed to organize a good part of it. I had some good motivation though. We need new patio furniture for our deck (our chairs basically fell apart, and our poor old table fell over in a windstorm and smashed last August!) and Big Lots had an extra 20% off coupon tonight. We used it to buy a new table & chairs set PLUS a little bistro set (for extra seating) PLUS a park bench (to put in the backyard by the swing set - no more standing!) - for about $350! We now have to store all of those things until its nicer outside, but at least there's room!