Entries Tagged 'Tackle it Tuesday' ↓

My laundry is never ending. We have five people in this family — a toddler who is learning to feed herself, a husband who wears several layers of clothing to work (and even though he only wears some of them a short while they get dirty in his line of work and need washed), two little boys who love anything dirty or liquid, and a Mother who takes care of all of the above people. It creates a lot of laundry! I’ve been trying to devise a plan to keep up with it forever and they have been only mildly successful.

Until recently. I gave up my obessiveness of doing things my way (and risked my laundry) and decided to ask my husband to chip in on the laundry and do one load each morning. Mind you, I sort them into piles for him (I am not going to give up that much!). Then each morning he brings me up one load that I fold and put it away quick, first thing in the morning. It’s super easy and avoids me the worry of having to leave the kids upstairs while I go into the basement and do the laundry without their having any supervision.

 Then each weekend, I take one weekend day and do the rest of the laundry all at once. That means that I do about 5-6 loads that day. If it’s nice, I hang it out on the line as it gets done washing. I fold it all throughout the day and put it away all at once.

This system has been working wonderfully for us and I’ve been able to stay on top of the laundry easily.

This weekend I wasn’t good about folding the laundry as it got done. Amidst the moving stuff, I figured there were better things to do. So by the time Monday came, I had 7 loads of laundry that needed folded and put away.

I did it though. Here’s just 5 loads of it. (I had put the other 2 away before I thought to take a photo!)

PS: After I was done, it was funny to see the little pile of all of the things I found in the laundry. Two earplugs (neither matched), three acorns, a $5 bill (Score for me!), a hair tie, and a memory card. Pretty much I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had found a package of Dutch Master cigars. ha!

To see this and other Tackle it Tuesdays, visit 5 Minutes for Mom.

A great way to save time and money, is to buy meat while it’s on sale, cook it all at once and then freeze it.

I wait until chicken is on sale for $1.99 per pound and I buy loads of it. And I do mean loads. (Hamburger seems to go on sale more than chicken, so I don’t get as much per shopping visit as I do chicken. Also, we don’t eat as much red meat as we do white.)

Fortunately for my wallet, unfortunately as far as work goes, chicken and hamburger were both on sale at the same time a couple of weeks ago.

I bought 17 pounds of chicken and 10 pounds of hamburger.

I then had myself a good ol’ meat cooking day.

I decided to grill about 12 pounds of chicken. (And I even learned how to grill on this day. I’ve never, until then. My sweet husband showed me how, all patient like. He didn’t even run inside and look up affordable life insurance quotes prior to teaching me. He seriously should have though; I’m not that good.)

I made some breasts marinated in BBQ sauce.

I cut strips and did some marinades in different sauces: BBQ, Ranch, and Italian.

I also did some plain (mostly for the kids).

Then, I cut chunks and browned some on the stove.

I also cooked some in light Italian dressing.

Cooking all this chicken at once saves a lot of time. Instead of just standing over the stove cooking one pan of chicken, I cook 4 at once. Instead of grilling one meal’s worth, I’m grilling 3. See what I mean?

So then, I put it in Ziploc bags, mark them according to contents, and freeze.

I make some small packages for my husband’s lunches. But most I use for dinners. When we’re running late, instead of a frozen pizza, we have grilled BBQ chicken, baked potatoes and corn. It takes literally as much time.

For the hamburger, I brown it all up, rinse and drain it, and freeze it as well. I use it for making Sloppy Joes or Tacos most of the time. It literally takes 5 minutes to make when the hamburger is already cooked. (Even quicker than a frozen pizza!)

I also made some Banana Bread while I was browning the meat. The kitchen was hot anyway, so it was a good time to do it. Besides, I had some browning bananas that needed used up.

It’s things like this that help make my life as a SAHM easier. It saves money. It saves time. What else could I ask for? Oh, besides a maid. Please.

To see this and other Tackle it Tuesdays, visit 5 Minutes for Mom.

   We all have dirty little secrets. Mine is my linen closet. This house has very little closet space to begin with, and no storage space whatsoever in the bathroom (not even a medicine cabinet) so the linen closet is packed to the gills. There is just way too much stuff for such a small place and add to that the fact that it was just poorly organized.  No one looks in my linen closet so I let it go far too long.

   I half heartedly decided to attack it last week and after about 10 minutes, I got interupted. So since then it’s just looked even worse. I am admitting that I had a load of towels that needed folded and put away that were sitting in the living room for 5 days but I couldn’t do anything with them because the linen closet was in such disarray. 

  It was pretty bad to begin with but I didn’t think to take a before until after I had already started tearing it apart last week.

 

(I didn’t realize that this picture didn’t show the top shelf which was jam packed with even more stuff! Note that the towels can’t begin to fit in here at this point.)
So here’s the deal:

• I threw away an entire grocery bag filled of stuff.
• Went to the Dollar Store and bought small baskets and under shelf organizers. Made a basket of my daily stuff (deo, razor, nail file, etc.) and my husband’s daily stuff (same type of thing) and organized everything else out.
• Took a bunch of unopened products down to the basement to my ’storage shelf’.

After:

 

You can see this and other Tackles at 5 Minutes for Mom.

Our tackle this week takes us to the dreaded chest of hidden treasures. Or junk. Or both. Yep, the drunk drawer. (hahaha, I am so leaving that typo!)

I liked this tackle, because I was able to do it while watching a flick. The baby happened to be sleeping (because she was in her father’s arms), so I didn’t have to worry about her scrounging around for miniscule peices of plastic she could partake of, or anything.

To be honest, I have um, 3 junk drawers. I have one for scissors, super glue, tape, paperclips, thumb tacks, paper, etc. The other 2 are just a mix of batteries, coupons, old film catridges, hooks, clips, scientific calculators,  cell phones, adapters (of cell phones new and ancient), etc. In this house we are extremely limited on cupboard space, but I have more drawers than I know what to do with. (Go figure!) I only tackled the two junk drawers that contain the non-office material.

Here’s one: 

Bonus to whomever can tell me what brand of batteries were on SCR at Rite-Aid during the month of December. haha

Our tackle this week was pretty big! At least it made a big difference! When we moved in here last year, a portion of the sidewalk leading up to the side porch was made of flagstone. The flagstone was old and broken up. We dug it out, and replaced it with several paving stones. However, it never looked finished. The weeds would grow up between them, etc. So this weekend, we went out and bought some mulch. (Forest hated the smell of it in the van!) We mulched around the sidewalk, around my flowers in the front, and around both of my husband’s blueberry bushes.

We keep saying that if only we knew how easy and cheap it ended up being, we’d have done it a lot sooner! Now I want to go and look for some Target coupons so that I can get one of those copper hose holders I’ve been drooling over, so that the hose isn’t thrown into a heap in the corner in the backyard. I’m ready to pretty things up!