Two Large Families

I hope everyone had a nice weekend. We finally had a nice day. Yea! We spent memorial day with my sister and her family who lives two doors away. You would think we see each other often, but really, we rarely get together. Her children and mine see each other more often, after school and on the weekends sometimes. Today is my sister’s anniversary. She has been married for 26 years. (Happy Anniversary!) She is younger than I am and has a bakers dozen and is expecting her 14th baby in August.
Here we are, I am the one on the left.

A Kitchen Makeover

This is the kitchen of one of the homes we remodeled. This is not a bad kitchen, but the Corian sink and counter had cracks in them. This is one of the reasons we are not fans of Corian.

BEFORE

Exterior Painting

As we have mentioned before we have a business of renovating and remodeling homes. We will be posting on several of the houses. This is a house we bought fixed up and resold. We also stage the homes before selling them with items form our house, garage sales, estate sales and things our daughter, from House of Grace, picks up for us, also from garage sales.

We saw some potential in this home. It looks kind of spooky!
Before

Organizing our Toys

We have a LOT of toys, which is understandable because we have a lot of children. We get rid of any toys that are not used often or at all, at our garage sales. The toys that we keep are the kiddies' favorites and we have a lot of each kind. So when they play they could all play and have enough. We store the toys in bins on these storage shelves in an extra room in the basement. The bins make it easy to see what is in them and they stack nicely.

Where to Add Extra Storage Spaces

Storage and organization are extremely important in trying to have a life that is not cluttered, especially with so many children.  Having a lot of children means we have a lot of things. Each person needs a bed, clothes, shoes, toys, and just things.  Every Christmas and birthday everyone is always getting more things. Multiply that by 12 and that is a lot of things. What do we do with all these things? In the past I would keep it all, just incase I needed it someday, but I learned several children and years ago that was not going to work. We have to be constantly rotating stuff. When something comes in, something should go out. I have a  box that I call are “Get Rid of Box”. So when clothes are out grown or I find something that just seems to be no longer needed, used, or wanted, we add it to the box. We have a couple of spots that we store these items until we have our garage sale or are able to donate them. We also have to store Christmas decorations, luggage, and many other things that are not used on a regular basis.  One spot is in the attic and the other is a large shelf above the garage door.
This is the shelf that we use in the garage.