The folks over at Real Simple Magazine contacted me and asked that we share some of the items that their editors have been tirelessly working on. Here are some of the great articles & tips they have added to their site:

Home Inventory Worksheets

Sources for Evening-Garden Plants & Pots

Dreaded Cleaning Tasks Made Easier

What is Your Favorite Speed-Cleaning Trick?

The Best Cleaning Wipes

A Chaotic Laundry Room Gets Organized

Solutions to the Most Vexing Pet Problems

Environmentally-Friendly Tips

New Uses for Clocks

Update Old Furniture With New Knobs & Pulls

Dealing with Mice, Bats, Deer, & Other Pests

I love Real Simple Magazine and have been a subscriber for years. My mother-in-law got me hooked on the magazine and she has given this subscription to me as a birthday gift every year. How wonderful is that?

Here is a tip for all of you other subscribers out there. The pictures in this magazine are beautiful and I love to hang on to my magazines and utilize them in other ways. If you notice in the front of the magazine, there is an index of what is in the issue. In the index, are tons of cute pictures that are the perfect size to be reused for cute gift tags. I cut these out and mount them on card stock to make cute tags for my gifts.

Anyone else subscribe? What has been your favorite tip from the magazine?

Tis the season for college students to began moving out and that means loads of great deals on organizing units and apartment style furnishings. Not only that, but many kids just offer up the stuff for free to rid themselves of having to lug the stuff home and back to school again. Keep in mind all those students who are graduating and don’t think they will need their furnishings in their new & more lucrative lives. It is a bargain-hunters dream so be checking the local papers and the free online classifieds for all these goodies.

Last weekend I scored several very nice organizing units and I was able to revamp some of the organizing systems in our house. The first organizing system that I created, was a unit that I purchased for our laundry room.

I saw this organizing idea on one of those organizing shows on television and thought, “I should do that!” The show was about a mom who just couldn’t keep up with her laundry and she had no good laundry system in place. She had a laundry area in her basement (just like me!) and clothes were piled everywhere. She had no idea of what was clean or what was dirty and the basement was a disaster.

The team came in and renovated her laundry area and added a shelving unit that assigned each person in the house a shelf for clean laundry. They used baskets to organize and made things look very pretty.

I loved this idea, but I wasn’t willing to fork over the big bucks for a huge unit like that. Lucky for me, a graduating university student had an organizer that she didn’t need anymore and I was able to score this unit for only twenty dollars.

My husband reassembled it in our basement and I set to work on creating a system for our own family. Each person has a tag now for their respective shelf. The top shelf is for our linens and then we go down the line for the family members.

Some other features that I added to my station are:

– A small dish tub, that rests below, that houses a small sewing kit and is reserved for items that need mending. Mending must be simple, but those items are now separated and have all the materials needed for a quick & easy repair.
– A larger tub for ironing. I don’t iron, but someone else in the family can now find anything they want to iron themselves. Aren’t I thoughtful?
– A bin for the, “Lonely Socks Club.” We sort socks at the end of all our loads, but all socks who are missing a partner are now located there. It makes finding matches much quicker.

The unit is only a holding station for the family. This is not a storage facility. When the kids get a little older, everyone will be responsible for clearing their own shelf and and putting their own clothes away. Baskets are neatly assembled beside the unit and each family member has a basket for themselves.

What are some ways that you organize your laundry area? What are some important items that you keep in your laundry room? Any systems that work great for you? Please share!