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Spring Cleaning/Organizing

 I made one more addition to my master closet in the form of this grey ottoman. It's a perfect place to sit and put my shoes on or off and a great place to store extra items. Now all I need to complete this room is the remove the light fixture with a pretty chandelier --eventually.

 It feels like I'm always tweaking my pantry. Even though it's double the size of what we had in our last house, it never feels like it's big enough, or organized well enough.  Maybe it's because the boys are getting bigger...Anyway, to get ready for summer and having the kids home every day for the next two months I started reworking it.

 One of our trouble areas is the bread section. It seems like I always had numerous versions of bread; sandwich bread, tortillas, English Muffins, etc. So I found this great idea and gave myself a shelf within a shelf. Perfect!!

I'm also a bit obsessed with peanut butter right now. Ethan has finally gone back to eating PBJ sandwiches and I love PB with an apple for a snack and there are so many different flavors now (white chocolate, biscotti, etc) - who knew!  So I lined the up in a row next to the bread making it easy to find and get to.

 I also love these little shelf attachments that can hold the tiny packets of things. Here I tucked in my lunchbox notes for the boys, as well as miscellaneous packets of things.

 Then it was just a matter of weeding through things that were old, reorganizing them on the shelves and finding better ways to store them.

 I always seems to have half full bags of chocolate chips and stuff because I use them more for stir-in items than using a full bag, so I took some old glass jars and used them for my storage. Prettier to look at and keeps them fresh. Plus I can see them instead of having to dig through my baking storage box.

 This is what actually got me started on my reorganization. I was having a very hard time finding spices in my spice cupboard and it was driving me crazy.  So I bought this cool spice shelf and some attachments for the doors and ended up with so much more space -- and the ability to see and reach everything with ease!!


 One more addition we did to the pantry was to add shelves to the door.

 It's helped out a lot!

 Our next big project was redoing the plants in the front of the house. The landscaping from the builder has been dying off over the past few years and we've slowly been replacing them.

 We dug out three big bushes at the front of the walkway and plan to take out the remaining ones by the front door probably this fall.

 It looks so much cleaner!

 I added a white Knock-Out rose bush to each side of the pink ones in the middle, as well as adding a few more day lily plants.

 Back inside I made some changes to our walls -- in the form of pictures!

We had these photos above in our upstairs hallway in our old house and only put them in our breakfast nook because they were big and there were already nails up, but we never really liked it.

Then I found these cool E A T prints in our kitchen color of red - perfect!

 Now Ethan will sit in his seat, point to the letters and say, " E, A, T -- eat!"

 I'm not sure if you can tell, but the frames I found have the white bead board look that matches the wall.

 This is probably my favorite addition to the house. I've had this cool blue/gray frame for a couple years but never had the perfect pictures for it -- until I decided to take a picture of each boy from their first time at the beach. The frame has a very beachy feel to it and I love being able to see the boys as babies on the beach, since that is one of our favorite things to do every year -- vacation at the beach.

This is hung up on the wall that I look at each time I walk out of my bedroom.

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