organization | Chrystina Noel

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cleaning out my closet

Posted in organization, tagged organizing, organizing closets, organizing pantries on January 20, 2013 | 4 Comments »

First of all: I love that song. It’s one of my possible karaoke songs. That’s right – picture that.

Second of all: I’m becoming my mother. (Every girl goes through this, right?) My mother’s in town right now – which means that it was a good chance to clean the house a little bit. I washed off the counters, did the dishes, cleaned the bathroom, did a load of laundry, vacuumed the floors, scrubbed the inside of the sink, cleaned the stove, cleaned the inside of the hood over the stove, reorganized the pantry, hemmed a curtain that needed to be shortened, and washed the walls. Yeahh…

However, it occurred to me at some point in this cleaning spree that everything in life is better when you blog about it, right? Right. So I remembered a post that I had seen over at HomeFries about reorganizing a hall closet and decided I would give it a go. There’s a weekly column by Tracy Benjamin “celebrating the neat freak in all of us”. And the girl is good – she’s organized a bar closet, a makeup drawer, her car, recipes, family get togethers, and more.

Here is a picture of what my pantry looked like before.

Then I took everything out of the pantry and organized it by type of food.

And then I put everything back in.

I ended up getting rid of some stuff that expired, learning that I have WAY too many boxes/bags of pasta open at the same time, and realizing that it’s about time that I put the recycling bin in a location where it doesn’t block the pantry door.

I’ve also already promised myself that I’m cleaning out my bedroom closet this spring for a massive spring cleaning – and I’m going to try really, really hard not to say to myself “but I might wear that again” if I haven’t worn it in the last 9 months. I’m probably going to need to invite somebody over to help me stick to this. We’ll see how this goes.

What’s your next house cleaning project?

Also. My poor roommate is going to come home and not be able to find anything. I would also like to clarify that my roommate is in Hawaii right now living the dream – soooo I’ll just have to give her the tour when she gets back.

PS. All of your extra tea is now in the tea basket. xo

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bloglovin: how I keep all of the blogs I read organized

Posted in blogging, organization, tagged blog organization, bloglovin, how to read blogs, organizing blogs you read on January 12, 2013 | 2 Comments »

Over the past year and a half I have discovered that I absolutely LOVE blogging. I have also discovered that I absolutely LOVE reading blogs. There are currently 110 blogs that I keep on my list to keep up with. Crazy, right? So with 110 blogs on my list I have found that I need to keep my blog organization and methods for reading them as easy as possible. I have found that using Bloglovin is the best way for me to handle this.

You open your account, click on “Account”, “Following”, and then “Add Blog” and you can add as many blogs as you want to the list, and categorize them as you see fit. Here’s a look at my categories:

I have my list of favorites, which no matter how backlogged I get I will always read. I have a category for friends – who are people that I see in my day to day life that also happen to write blogs – and I always read those posts as well. blogs to try is the category for blogs that I come across that I think “yeah, this might be for me” so I throw them in there to check it out. I clean through that category every few months to get rid of the ones that didn’t click and move the ones that did to a different category. bbc philly 2012 is specifically the people that I met at Bloggy Boot Camp in Philadelphia last year. Then I broke down the other categories by type of blog – some of these categories have 3 blogs in them, and some of them have 20. The only other category that needs explaining is xxx not now. When I’ve been reading a blog for a while and I determine it’s not for me anymore, I put it in that category. I use this category when I don’t want to completely move on – maybe there’s one weekly post that I really enjoy.

So why does this work so well? Because Bloglovin gives you a preview of all of the posts so I can sort through them before I even read them.

So there are a bunch of categories that I can just browse through and read through the titles of the posts and look at the pictures and decide if I want to keep reading. If I feel like that content is not relevant to me I can just “mark as read” and it will take it out of the “All unread posts” category. The easiest categories for me to browse are cards, philadelphia, and xxx not right now. So that takes some time out of this process.

While I realize 110 blogs is a LOT, this setup works for me right now. When it becomes too much, I’ll change it up a little bit. How do you read your blogs?

Also, no this isn’t a sponsored post, I really just like Bloglovin.

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how to organize memories, attempt 2

Posted in organization, tagged how to save cards, organizing memories, organizing with binders on October 3, 2012 | 1 Comment »

A few months ago, I attempted to start organizing my memories – this includes everything from ticket stubs, to theater brochures, to wedding invitations, to homemade greeting cards, to postcards and beyond. Here’s a reminder of what that looked like the first time I tried this -

It was working really well until I realized I had another whole box of stuff from previous years that needed to be sorted. I finally decided it was time to do it right. It wasn’t cheap. I’m still not convinced it’s the best way to do it, but it’s the best way to do it right now. I bought many half sized binders and many many protective sheets, and I started filing. Hopefully this theory lasts a little bit longer than the last one. Now I just need to find a shelf to put them on.

Also, in case you were wondering, I store pictures in photo albums. I actually print my favorite pictures from every event and put them in old fashioned photo albums. I usually print pictures in multiples of 4 and visualize the page layouts as I’m choosing which pictures I want to print. Where do I print the pictures? Snapfish. If you sign up for their emails, every few months you get an email that says “99 prints for 99 cents” – and with shipping it comes to $6.50ish and it shows up right at your door via US mail. Awesomeness.

So, I ask the question one more time, how do you store your memories?

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how to display jewelry

Posted in decorating, organization, tagged cork board jewlry, decorating your bedroom, hanging jewelry, how to display jewelry, orgainzation on September 30, 2012 | 2 Comments »

Since I’ve been setting up my new room, I realized that I need a cool way to display jewelry. After a little inspiration from Lucy over at A Small Insight, and determining that the wall hanging organizers from etsy were my favorite – I decided a little arts and crafts project was in order. Actually, most of the arts and crafts were done before, and now there was just organizing to be done.

I took all of my necklaces and large earrings and hung them up on a large cork board in my room. My smaller earrings and hair pieces are stored in smaller containers in my night stand. Everything is together, easily accessible, and I’m able to see most of the pieces at the same time – which means that I wear more of them more often. Check it out.

As for the other things on the board, it’s still being filled, but – there’s a post card from my purchase from Threads (if you haven’t checked out Ashley and The Shine Project, you probably should – she brightens most of my days). Also, there’s some souvenirs from arts and crafts at the from desk with BJ and notes from a decorating battle I had with Faraz one week. These are the kinds of things I hold near and dear to my heart. Friends make me happy.

Anyway, how do you display your jewelry?

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