About me, Elly

My family

Is made up by me, my husband and our 4 year old daughter, and a giant schnauzer who thinks he is the size of a chihuahua. We live in southern Sweden, but speak both Swedish and English at home. My husband works and I'm a stay at home mom. We recently moved to get closer to my husbands office, and the school my daughter is going to attend. Our daughter recently started attending preschool 3 half days a week, which leaves me with more time to focus on our home. I'm going to use this blog to record what I do to get our new apartment more organized. 

 

My home

Our new apartment is walking distance from my husbands office, and biking distance from everything else we need as it is a small town. This apartment feels better for us in every way, its completely renovated, brand new appliances, the location is perfect with a lot of nature, we love our tiny balcony.

However this apartment is smaller than where we previously lived. We used to have much more storage. We had 6 wardrobes and one very large closet in the hall, and several more cabinets in the kitchen. The closet stored everything from nonperishables from the pantry to out of season shoes and dog food.

Now we have 2 wardrobes in the entry and a small closet in each bedroom. Its no problem fitting things where we live now, but its not organized in a way where we can access things easily. Most of our storage space just feel stuffed and cluttered.

Not only did we move, but my daughter is getting older so the organization we did have with in her room isn't working for her anymore and needs to be updated. The smaller kitchen, storage, closets and my daughters room are going to be the first things I'll handle.


Due to the apartment being renovated basically up until we moved we, and covid restrictions not letting us have a real viewing we didn't buy the new furniture we needed since we didn't have the measurements. We did have a floor plan, but it wasn't to scale, so we guessed a lot before moving in. For example we didn't know how big of a dresser we could have so we didn't buy one until after we moved in, and had to make do with moving boxes for a while.  

We knew that our kitchen table for 6 wasn't going to fit, so we had a picnic table, but we didn't know if our couch would fit. We really like it, and its not old enough to warrant getting rid of neither financially or economically. So we brought it, knowing we might still need to replace it. It fits, but barely and only one the other side of the room than where we wanted it. This move was an interesting project.

To get some more fun before and after pictures I've stopped my day to day up keep of everything. My daughter got all excited about doing a video, and taking pictures of us tidying her room so she just emptied out all her boxes and shoved everything in her drawers as is. We'll have to handle that soon.


My organization

I've always liked the feeling after having organized a space, everything in the correct place, just looking neat. But while working to become more minimalistic I came to appreciate the process as much, if not more than just having everything done. I realized that keeping a home as organized as I want it to be takes work, firstly it needs to be properly done and then I need to continuously work on it. The fact that I like keeping things clean helps a lot, since I will empty out shelves or cabinets regularly just to wipe down everything.

It was a much easier to keep things neat in my old kitchen since everything was organized in a way that worked. Here I haven't gotten there yet, I haven't had the time to get it all done just right. I have had everything labeled before, but was never really satisfied with the labels, it took some effort to switch labels if I wanted to change it, and the labels weren't dishwasher-proof. So I'm going to update my labels, and have them hang on a string so I can take them off easier.


I hope the way I do it will help show someone else how to get started, so they don't have too go through the same amount of trial and error as I did.

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