ReAnn Rothwell’s Money Saving Ideas, Tax & Organizing Tips

If you can come up with a small amount of space, you can have a dedicated space to charge and store all of your gadgets and their respective cords and chargers.

GeekBrief.tv has a 4-minute episode — click here to watch – on turning a 12-pair Shoe Organizer from the Container Store into a charging and storage center. Of course, I love it because each nook is labeled!!

From the Episode Notes:

“Having a houseful of gadgets isn’t all shiny, happy. It is more like spaghetti. It is a pile of wires. You have power cords, USB cables, A/V cables, and other A/V cables. It is a big, old, nasty mess. We thought of a way to fix it, and on this edition of Geek Brief, we show you how to turn your gadget chaos into gadget nirvana. ”

Shoe Organizer: Container Store (Wal-mart, Shopko, etc)     Power Squid:  Think Geek

In my childhood, my mother designated Wednesday as grocery day.

We knew there was a time each Wednesday, after she had time to go thru the Wednesday newspaper ads, when Mom would go out and buy the groceries.

Now, as adults, we still watch the ads and pick up groceries towards the end of each week.

In addition, in our household we designate weekly time for some household/office tasks. Thursday nights are always for garbage and litter boxes since we often have company on Friday evenings.  Friday afternoons are my Getting-Things-Done weekly review and rewrite of my things to do list for next week. Saturday mornings in the summer is either mowing the lawns or the Farmer’s Market. Sunday afternoons, twice a month, we settle our bills, as we try to keep most weekends computer-free.

I find rituals and schedules help ground me and help make sense out of a very hectic and full life.

Do any of you have any weekly housekeeping/office rituals? And what determined when they occur?

  Are you captivated with home design/improvement television shows? If so, you are not alone. (I try to watch every on of them that has the word ‘office’ in the description - then pick apart the design for what really works and what just looks good on TV. “Ooops - they blocked the drawer to that desk!”)

TVacres.com reports an enormous number of design shows on TV: over  200!

Home design shows first cropped up in the 1940’s but it wasn’t until 1979, when “This Old House”, the grandmother of all TV design shows, first aired, that the current design show craze was born.

How many hours of design shows per week do you watch? If you could only watch ONE show, which one would it be? (My favorite year round is Decorating Cents, but in the summer, I just have to watch Design Star!)

Do you have an example of applying something you learned from design television to a real-life project? I would love to hear!

P.S. Please note that I have added a new catagory titled Decorating Ideas for those posts that have decorating tips & ideas in them - hope you enjoy !!

‘Keep calm and carry on’, is a message that was fly-posted all over Britain during World War 2.

Is this statement is as appropriate now as ever? Think about it…

Personally, I feel the phrase has a strange relevance to the Western world’s situation now, and is a nice juxtaposition to the scare tactics and fear mongering we tend to see and hear everywhere.

These are simple, but meaningful words - whether you apply them on a national and worldly level as they were originally meant or personal level.

Is your day falling apart with a hundred-thousand interruptions and you are pulling your hair out?  Be a little British! Take a little break, make yourself a cuppa tea, take a deep breath (or ten) to calm your racing heart and then carry on… 

 I came upon these neat looking magnetic leaves at swissmiss. These uber-cool magnetic leaves, designed by Richard Hutton for the innovative European office furniture company Gispen, originally adorned the ceiling for the offices of a museum in Rotterdamn.

Hutton used hundreds of them on the office ceilings and they could be used to shrub up your office, kitchen or garage, provided you have exposed metal surfaces.

Gispen has taken Hutten’s design into production in the certainty that these magnetic leaves can add a lot of fun and function to life.

“It couldn’t get much simpler: a plastic leaf with a

strong magnet in the stem. Throw it against something

made of steel or metal, and the leaf sticks to it. Take a

couple of hundred leaves, place them or throw them

all against a metal modular ceiling and you have a

wonderful leaf roof above your head, one that’s functional

too. Because all those leaves absorb sound and

thus improve the acoustics in the room.”

At the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum, they are flying off the museum shop shelves at $2.50 each. For the crafty / DIY’ers amongst us, I think you could make these pretty cheaply with some fabric leaves and some craft magnets.

I can see a bunch of these on a magnetic chalk board wall - a mock forest in your office bringing some of the outdoors inside!

What could be simpler than this???

Branch Bookshelf – Simple, Stylish and Easy! The Branch Bookshelf - at lunuganga from wokmedia.

The designer wanted to take something of the feeling of the flooded environment home. “We took the image of partially submerged trees and translated it into shelves that have both the qualities of the overgrown lake that surrounded us and the quietness of European furniture.” 

Easy to make on your own also!?!?!

 This very modern, contemporary, and flexible system package can be assembled in the configurations in the product images shown or any other configuration you might like. All of the shelves and units can be repositioned virtually any where in the system by simply lifting and moving.

White or black shelves and plexi sides.

Found at Funktion Alley:  Funktion Alley is an independent Swedish company that was established in February 2006 in Malmö.  ( There is that Sweden influence again!!)

Mistakes happen in life. It is an unfortunate fact.

What we all need to do is:

• 1) Learn something from each and every mistake.
• 2) Take responsibility for the mistake and make any amends needed or possible - even if a heartfelt “I am sorry” is all that is possible.
• 3) Move on and let it go.

  It must be my upcoming trip to Sweden, Norway and Denmark that has kismet bringing a lot of Northern Europe design to my attention lately. I was perusing Demakersvan, a Dutch design house and their renovated studio in Rotterdam when I came across Drawerment. (Please see the official stats at the bottom of this post.)

This is made up of a bunch of second hand drawers from old office furniture installed into white MDF boxes - very simple. THINK of the possibilities!  A wall of these would made very nice storage with great visual and conversational interest.  

I could see this in several configurations - you could even make a desk out of it on a wall.

AUTHOR: JAROSLAV JUŘICA
YEAR: 2008
MATERIAL: MDF, 2ndhand drawers
DIMESIONS: different sizes
Drawerment is a composition of drawers collected from old office furniture. The installation enables viewers to find their own story in it.
In 1993, Tejo Remy designed the iconic „Chest of Drawers”. He assembled different kinds of drawers into an accidental and dynamic composition. I took this idea apart and let the drawers fly free to find their own position in the corner of the room.
See more here

Many people say the words, “I HAVE to get organized” with slumped shoulders and a sigh. It is viewed as an unpleasant task or something that needs to be tackled and fought through every time. Believe it or not, organizing can be fun and take loads off of your shoulders!

Being organized does not mean just getting rid of things but about being able to find and use the things that you do have.  Organizing is also not just about having pretty, matching containers to put all of your stuff into.  However, it can be soothing and make you more content when things do in fact match, look good together and are attractive.

It’s not a requirement that you go out and spend a lot of money for things to be visually appealing and efficient. There have never been more organizing shows, magazines, websites and books out there on the market than there are now.  They can give you an unlimited source of ideas. However, just because you see something in a magazine or store, it doesn’t mean that you have to buy that exact product – some of them are pretty pricey. There are tons of DIY creative alternatives!!  (We talk about a lot of them in this blog - check out the archives!!)

For example:

1) Paint Cans: Rather than spending lots of money on round containers meant specifically for organizing go to your local hardware store and buy empty metal paint cans. You can then decorate/label them using any number of techniques from stickers, to paint pens to hot gluing little items on the sides to indicate what is inside. You can use the paint pens to make ‘labels’ on the cans to indicate what each one holds. Or you can buy brass labels that you can gently bend then hot glue onto the can or simply print out a plain computer label to stick on Cans like this have an unlimited array of uses. They can be as colorful and crazy or as simple, modern and sleek as you want to make them.

2) Shoe or Check Boxes: Another great option for fun, easy and reasonable storage is to decorate shoe, check or other cardboard boxes.  You can cover the boxes with Contac-type paper which will not only be long-lasting but will help to reinforce the boxes as well. Wall-paper and fabric work also. From there, the possibilities are endless.

3) Colored Containers: Right after each holiday, brightly colored storage boxes colored appropriately for the holiday are available for a small percentage of their original cost. You will save yourself tons of time, effort and energy by being able to see immediately  the bright colored boxes. Use a red one for paid bills and tax returns, green ones for office supplies, orange ones for blank paper etc.

4) Clear Jars: With one glance, you will be able to see where everything is and even better, how many you have left.  Pens, clips, paper clips, small post-its etc. (I did one office with the client’s set of antique jars in row above her desk. Very pretty and very functional!)

5) Containerize: Does your desk look like a disaster? Is it filled to the brim with pens, pencils, clips and other miscellaneous debris? Containerize! In the short time it will take you to sort things into like categories, you can have a relaxing, orderly space. One box for writing stuff, one box for clips, one box for personal accessories and so on. With the incredible selections out there these days, you’ll be able to find something that will fit into your desk and area space and still allow you to have everything within reach.

With just a little change in your thinking, you too can turn your organizing projects from a unpleasant task to fun!