Prim and Proper Method

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"Special Mail" Organization

What do you do with your holiday cards, or any other "special mail" that you want to keep? FIRST, I am here giving you permission if you don't have a lot of room, and have too many special cards every year, please let them go, recycle them and make room for the ones to come in 2021. I usually take that route- I love getting the cards and having them hang in my hallway, for the holiday season, then take them down, add any new addresses or birthdays to my contacts in my phone and recycle them. ALSO it is OK to keep them as long as it is with intention and they are kept in an organized way. Piled all over the house, or shoved into a box that is shoved in a closet is not what I am talking about. This year I decided to try something different, I am going to make it a goal to keep all of the special mail (my kids get cards from all of the grandparents for all of the holidays plus all of the holiday cards, baby or graduation announcements, and wedding invitations...

Goal Setting

Wow, it has been a while since I have posted. 2020 has been a roller coaster! I have had so many ups, it has been a great experience for me. It was this time (December) of 2019 that I sat down and wrote out my goals for Prim and Proper Method. Of course this was before COVID-19. I am happy to report that I hit all but 1 of them!! Goal setting is a great tool when you don't even know where to start. You need to organize your goals before you can organize your stuff. Sometimes you need to organize your thoughts before anything else. This time of year we start thinking about new year resolutions and how we can improve in the new year! Make some Big, make more small and manageable. My goals were not HUGE in 2019.I checked them often to make sure I was staying on track, and I adjusted as I needed to. The goal that I didn't hit, was a goal that I didn't "do the math" on so of course it didn't get completed. Don't just throw numbers out there, or pick ideas that...

11/15 Home office/Craft areas!

Go through all paperwork and decide what is trash, and what needs to be filed, and what needs to be dealt with right away! Create space for your new piles. We have a few different systems in our office- I have a "need to get to" tray with 3 slots one for each business and then a home one. The for Billy's Business we have wall organizers and each month is a different folder! This makes it so easy to file the papers quickly and they stay organized until tax time! And the third is we turned 2 drawers into small filing cabinets and one hold all of Billys past tax papers, and the other one is for all of our household papers. One drawer is in our office, the other is in our TV stand in our living room! Sometimes you have to get creative!! Wall organizers Filing drawer in our T.V. stand If you have an actual office do you need it to be more than just an office? Ours serves many purposes- It's a craft room, game room and an office. We don...

10/15 Drop Zone!

So today's challenge is working on your Drop Zone! I love drop zones, the space can also be called a command center, mud room, or if you want to be fancy the owners suit. Usually is in a place that everyone can see and uses! I call it the drop zone because everyone in my family, including me, comes in and drops everything we are bringing into the house in this spot.If you don't have a spot for all of this yet, then you might be using your kitchen table, or kitchen island as your drop zone, which might be driving you crazy when its time to eat dinner! Our drop zone is right when we come in from the garage. It's not a large space, but it is in the perfect spot of the house, and I added things that we needed to allow it to have a home for all of the things I wanted to keep in this area! First thing you need to do after you have cleaned everything out and decided what you are keeping, you need to make a home for everything you want in this room. Then you will n...

9/10 Kitchen

Start with one cabinet and drawer at a time. To give everything a home, I like to use tools that help me give things a home and keep things together and organized. I also only have 1 of most things in my kitchen. Most of the time you only need one of each thing at any given time, so why clutter your space with things you will not use often? When organizing, follow the steps and keep only what you want and have room for. I like to use this organizer ( I found it at TJ Maxx) and use it to hold the 2 cookie sheets I have, and my cast-iron pan. It holds them up right so that they are easy to take out of the cabinet and also easy to put back. I also use this rack to hold my lids. I have recently discovered that you can get 1 lid that will fit all of your pans, and I am really thinking about getting one. I'm not sure why I haven't done it yet. Maybe because I have the space for the lids now... but the idea of having to reach just one lid for any pot I am using...

8/15 Flexibility

As important as it is to have a schedule and how most of us thrive when we know what is coming up and what is expected of us and our day, flexibility is equally as important. Things happen, things we can't predict or imagine would happen, do happen. We need to be able to move with those things. We need to teach our kids that when our lives change we are still in control of us and we can make the choice to move with it. Fighting it just makes us more frustrated and feeling out of control and helpless. When you teach flexibility you teach them to be more balanced and able to continue to get tasks done.