Organized frenzy.

I think I've mentioned a few times here how absolutely crazy my nesting has been in the past week or two.  I had it with Ben and Addie, and right around this time with them both, but I think this one takes the cake.

And I totally blame Pinterest.

How can you stare at all these gorgeous, organized spaces and not want yours to look like that, pregnant or no?

So I finally got to work, hit up some dollar stores for baskets and storage units, tore the house apart, sorted into piles and made labels.

The destruction that ensued during the organization process was, well, unreal, as documented in instagram pictures.

  

I'm still not totally done, but as I watch everything come together, I know how worth it this all was.  Hours of work, hours of shopping, hours of scouring Pinterest for ideas...it all made for one heck of an organized, pretty house.  And that makes this nesting gal happy.  

And exhausted.

Phew.

I'll share it all here because what would be the fun of getting this organized if I can't show it off, right?  I'll tackle a zone a day, starting with the pantry today.  

Our pantry looked like this months ago:

It was a hall closet (and a messy one, at that).  

This house doesn't have a pantry.  And I do a lot of bulk shopping.  Azure Standard Co-op is the only way I can reign in our grocery budget while eating healthy, so all those bulk items really needed a place to go.  One day it hit me that we should add coat hooks in our mud room and take advantage of this closet by turning it into a pantry.  

Hubby went to work on tackling this project and before long, we had a pantry!  But it was kind of ugly and disorganized and over time, just got uglier and more disorganized.  So I pulled every last thing out of the pantry, gathered up some baskets, printed off labels and wound up with this:

I've been collecting every last glass jar we've brought into this house for the past few years because I knew I  needed a good solution for storing all those bulk baking products, grains, beans, etc., that I get from Azure.  But I didn't want to shell out mega bucks for glass containers.  Although someday, when (if?) money is no object, I will own these and love them:

And these:

But for now, I really heart my canning jars and the purpose they serve.

I got most of the black baskets from the dollar store since I was not about to drop $5 a piece on baskets when I needed about 50 of them for the whole house.  Besides, the ones at the dollar store (especially Dollar Tree - these black ones came from Dollar General though) are awesome and perfect.  A few of them I got at Big Lots (like the blue containers on the top shelf).

I store some bulk things on the bottom of the pantry floor, like my Biokleen dishwashing detergent that I also get from Azure (I'm a brand pluggin' fool today, eh?).  At some point I'll get a pretty little container for that, but for now, just pretend it's not an ugly brown box.

I got the labels for free from the amazing blog, Sissy Print.  I edited them in gimp (I'm all about the FREE!) to fit my needs and I can't tell you how much I love them!  Labels just make me happy.  And pretty labels?  Happier!  Hubby totally rolled his eyes at me when I told them how happy pretty labels make me.  He's like, "Um, I'd take some masking tape and a permanent marker and that'd work for me."  

Silly hubby.

I also prettied up some of my bulk counter containers.

I got the big flour container at Target a long time ago, the sugar and coffee containers from Walmart, also a long time ago, and the tea container is just a random vase.  

Well, that about sums it up!  I couldn't be happier!  This project was a pretty long one when all was said and done since our pantry started out as a coat closet, but it was worth it times a million.  

So it's NORMAL to be sick your whole pregnancy!

I've heard so much conflicting info about illnesses and your immune system while pregnant.  Before my pregnancy with Adalyn, I thought what I'd heard - that our immune systems are actually stronger while pregnant - was true.  And it made sense to me since I didn't get sick at all (or maybe once or twice that I can't remember) with Ben's pregnancy.

Adalyn's pregnancy was rough on my health.  I was sick a lot.  Though in going through old blog posts, my suspicions were confirmed that I was sick much less frequently with her pregnancy than this current one.  

I brought it up with my last OB who told me it's a myth that women have stronger immune systems during pregnancy - it's actually quite the opposite.  But she didn't explain why and I didn't seek out any more information.

Until today.  I am on my eight billionth 12th or 13th illness (all either stomach bugs or colds/flu) since getting pregnant.  And when I do get sick, it's much worse than normal and it lasts forever and a day.  My longest reprieve from illness has been a week and a half.  That is just nuts.  Feeling extreeeeemely frustrated, I finally decided to take to the interwebs to figure this mystery out.

Turns out my last OB was right.

Pregnant women have suppressed immune systems.

It makes sense.  Our bodies need to suppress our immune systems because it keeps our bodies from fighting off our babies - essentially, foreigners to our body.  Right.

It also makes sense that you get sick more often with each subsequent pregnancy.  You have more kids at home bringing you germs, you're out more often and, well, your body isn't quite as awesome as it was before with yet another pregnancy under its belt.

Don't be stupid and give your body 7 whopping months to recover from its last pregnancy, though, or mark my words: you will regret what happens.  If this pregnancy doesn't actually kill me, I will be surprised.  

There's your PSA for the day.  If you find yourself sick more than you're not while you're pregnant, don't freak.  It's normal.  It'll get better once you're holding your baby in your arms.  :)

Project: turn basement into something...

...is a go!

I ran it by hubby and he didn't seem to think it was the worst idea ever, so it looks like we'll be "faux" finishing it! Which means we have hours and hours and days and days of work ahead of us.  Embarrassingly, it has become a dumping grounds for everything we don't know what to do with right now, and not in a pretty, organized sort of way.  In a throw-it-down-the-stairs-and-pretend-it-doesn't-exist way.  

That's all pretty much my fault, too.  I take full responsibility for chucking things down the basement stairs.  It's a little scary and dark down there, okay?

So I think we'll repaint the walls a nice pretty color and spray the ceiling black to save money.  Here's our inspiration picture, from this blog post:

It may be a little sports bar-ish, but I'm okay with that.  

And...that's it.  I don't know that this was worthy of a whole blog post, but, you know, that's alright.  I'll blame pregnancy since I blame everything else on that.  :)

Edited to add: Another thing I can blame on pregnancy.  I have become a freak in the past week.  Like, out-of-control nesting.  Like nesting on crack.  Like nesting...whatever.  You get the idea.  

My every thought revolves around organizing and redecorating and redoing rooms.  Someone stop me!  

Who else has gone loco when pregnant?  

Decorating and all that jazz!

Bear with me as this post is pretty much entirely for my own benefit.  I've got a stomach bug today (yay!) so I'm stuck in bed, bored and trying to distract myself.  

I also got bit by the nesting bug last week, so I've been a reorganizing fool lately and sitting here unable to do anything is really cramping my style.  I had so many plans for today!  At least I got most of the playroom done this morning before getting hit with the nasties.

So...to bide my time and fulfill the urge to nest, I've been pinteresting in bed.  Did I make that word up?  Here are all the things I want to get done!  I'll pretend they'll all get done but anyone who knows me knows I'll be lucky to get 20% of this done.  But I'm a dreamer!  So shoot me!

Most pictures are hyperlinked to their source if there was one.

Here's our tiny, ugly upstairs bathroom.  It gets used never...as in ever.  I want to make it pretty so that we want to use it!  

It looks prettier here in this picture because it's a picture the realtor posted when we bought the house and apparently the only picture I have of this bathroom.  Too sick to go upstairs and take a picture of its current state, but it's uglier than this.

Now here's my inspiration!  

From Marthastewart.com

I think our bathroom is a perfect candidate for this makeover!  It's already gray, so all we'd have to do is find a similar mirror and paint it, paint the trashcan we have, get a new shower curtain and, a long shot, find a vintage towel holder like this one to paint.  Oh, and we desperately need curtains of some sort.  I think those few simple changes would drastically change the feel of that bathroom!

This one will likely never happen, but it's still a big, fat dream.  We have a very large unfinished basement.  I would LOVE to install some drop ceilings and clean it up and turn it into a huge playroom for the kids/sewing room for me so they can play down there while I sew.  Then we could have a guest bedroom, which we currently don't have.  Here's pretty much exactly what I'm thinking.  We would have to mock finish it so it wouldn't cost nearly as much as professionally finishing the basement, which I doubt will ever make its way into our budget before we sell this house.  That would mean no nice, pretty walls like in this picture.

These are pretty much exactly what our basement walls look like (this is our mud room), which really isn't terrible because they're at least painted white.

And if I ever get that mock finished basement, I must have this for my cutting table/fabric storage:

And this is all a total pipe dream, but I would do just about anything to have all this in my office for my business someday:

I've really revamped the playroom this week, so this picture is pretty outdated and I'll share a new one soon, but this is at least what the space is like.

The last few projects I want to accomplish in the playroom are these:

A wall like this:

This alphabet wall:

This awning made for the "General Store" I created for them:

And then a random one:

I for sure will be making this.  I have a frame that's just sitting unused anyway, and I desperately need this kind of organization in my life.

And the rest is all about reorganizing.  Here are all my organization inspirations.  :)

Yes, nesting really does this to me.  Every single time.  Too bad my house doesn't stay so organized sans pregnancy.  Maybe someday!