29 Reader Space: Ashli's Organized & Lovely Manor!

Wanna see first hand why I am so obsessed with pairing organizing with beauty?  My blog pal, Ashli from Maillardville Manor, really defines it perfectly actually.  Her whole home is ooh la la organized AND gorgeous to boot.  I am always looking forward to a sneak peak in another one of her cabinets or closets {sounding stalkerish much?}, and I figured some of you may appreciate her eye candy as well!

When it come's to Ashli's home office space, she blogged:

Here's the HUB of our home, it's where we pay the bills, make appointments, and blog from!
It's where our cell phones charge, and where the stationary equipment lives.

Every organized office needs:

• Bulk storage: for printer paper, plastic sheet protectors, printer ink etc . . . We use the large wicker basket at the top to store those things
• Somewhere to keep important records: The Green binders is where I keep track of our Medical Records, also cutouts from magazines, future project ideas, kind of like a hard copy of Pinterest 
• Correspondence tools: The two green boxes below that hold greeting cards, envelopes, and stamps.  Below that the green box holds photographs.
• Every organized office needs an INBOX!

On the door hangs our spare keys

And below the spare keys is a small cork board, I think every office space needs a cork board. There will always be small transient pieces of paper . . . Always!

On the desktop is where we keep our cell phone charging dock!  

One last full scope look at the insanely organized office space?

And I adore that she can just close it all up when she is all finished up with things and wants to streamline the space even more!

Moving right along since there is SO much more to see.  Like her KITCHEN CABINETS!

I finally got around to organizing the Kitchen Pantry. I still cannot believe how long it takes to set up a house. I remember when I was little I could find the play husband, set up the play house, take care of the fake babies and have it all down by dinner.  But one thing at a time and yesterday was the kitchen pantry.  First I we Lee installed the pull down racks {thank goodness because standing on my tippy toes was starting to hurt}. They were really simple to install {for Lee anyways}. Although we had to install one twice because we didn't leave any clearance for the door hinges and the rack would hit them when you pulled it down.

I choose these exact ones, first because of their price {$10} and second because they could hold more then just little spice bottles. These racks can hold anything from soup cans, to jars of pasta sauce, to a box of jello. They were too narrow to fit the big double cans of tomatoes and chick peas...

I was able to install the little wire basket by myself, as it involved no tools :) I thought it was a good place to store our coffee filters and coffee. Because we don't often drink coffee, we only have a small bag of it on hand {I Love coffee but I have to limit my intake to once a week}. So the little basket works great for that.

Lee is a big tea drinker, and I enjoy a cup here and there so we do have a lot of tea on hand. On the middle shelf you'll see a clear container labeled Green Tea, we buy loose leaf green tea and store it in an air tight container. And on the lowest shelf on the right hand side you'll see some tea bags in a clear container {from Ikea} made for holding tea bags. I love this container, it has little dividers inside to separate all your different tea bags.

I like to bake, sometimes from scratch, sometimes from a mix. So I have a dedicated cupboard for just baking supplies. I found that when I kept all the baking ingredients in with the rest of our food, I would be moving the condensed milk I use twice a year to get to the tea I use twice a day. So I picked the small cupboard next to the pantry cupboard and designated that "The Baking Cupboard".
Inside the baking cupboard I keep the Brown Sugar, the chocolate chips, the vanilla extract, the raw sugar, the brownie mix {yum}.

There wasn't enough room to keep all the flour and big bag of sugar, so I made space in the lower part of the pantry.

Under the counter is our lower pantry.  I store things that I don't need to get to everyday here. It's also the COSTCO part of the kitchen {if you shop at costco you need a costco part of the kitchen, a place where you store all of the "extra" food, because nothing at costco comes in a one pack}. Since these doors wouldn't be opened on a daily basis, I thought it would be a good cool, dark place to store our onions, potato's, yams and garlic.

Drooling yet?  It's OK, you aren't alone....

More?  Yes please!

Are cords driving you nuts?  Seriously, tangled masses of eye soars right?  Not for Ashli, she even found a way to make their slew of cords become organized AND look good!!

Our "home entertainment corner" has one very overwhelmed power outlet! So we Lee decided we needed to get all those cords in order, and we I knew just what to do.

I picked up these little cord labels for $0.99 {we bought ours from an outlet store, but the container store carries them too}. Since we have so many wires and they're all black we wanted to make sure we grabbed the right cord at the right time.

Each little plastic cases has a little cardboard picture inside. We've got, the TV, DVD, Receiver, Computer, and internet modem.

Lee bought the special Surge Protector Power Bar, this is important because, "it will filter out any power spikes that could damage your equipment", says Lee.  It costs around $40 but could save you hundreds on your replacement costs. . .  safety first! {I'm a dork}

This is one of those Bonus Points projects from around the house, not a must do, but a nice to have done sort of project.   

For me, that's a can't wait to find those label clips kind of project!  Smart smart!!!

Last but certainly not least, I am going to wrap up the organizing tour with a quick look at her linen closet, which she completley customized to fit her belongings to a T!

Seriously, what is it about linen closets that make them junk magnets?? Maybe it's the fact that they are meant to hold sheets, and folding fitted sheets is horrible, and so it makes you give up on the whole closet?? who knows!  But I'm so excited to show you our newly organized linen closet, folded fitted sheets and all!

If you missed our Linen Closet Progress post, here's what the closet looked like before:

And here's what it looks like after:

We painted the closet walls "Geyser" by Martha Stewart. I wanted something a bit darker and more dramatic. I love the way it looks with the wall color and the trim color. Painting the insides of closets is my favorite thing to do. It's such a surprise every time you open the door.

Lee installed solid shelves, I just like solid shelving better! We have wire shelving in our front hall closet and it works really well for shoes and dirty soles. But everything that's going into the linen closet is clean, so we had the option to choose more attractive shelving.  We ran wood around the perimeter of the closet, then cut the shelves to fit and screwed them into place.

We absolutely needed to make room for the vacuum. As much as I wanted to have pretty shelves with beautifully folded sheets and towels, filling the whole closet, we HAD to fit in the vacuum {function wins over beauty every time here} and lost a lot of space but we had no choice. We were able to squeak out a bit more storage, Lee installed two small shelves just big enough to hold to baskets from Ikea. In the top basket is where I keep the "Fall/Winter" touches for around the house, the lamb skin throws and fuzzy blanket. And the bottom basket is where I keep all of the throw pillow covers, we have summer ones and winter ones and fall ones and since I started sewing we've had A LOT more..

I had a friend over the yesterday for coffee and she wanted to get "the inside scoop" on today's post, so I took her upstairs and showed her the linen closet and her reaction was "where are all your sheets?" So I thought you might be wondering the same. We only have 2 sets of bed sheets for our bed, our white organic sheets, and a set of organic flannel sheets for the winter {p.s. organic flannel is expensive, next time I might just opt for regular flannel}. I don't think we need anymore than that. Once a week I wash the sheets, then put them right back on.  We all have sheet sets in our linen closet sitting there getting musty, I like things simple and to me simple is two sets of sheets.  But I wouldn't go fewer than two sets in case of emergency, we've had to spend a hot summer night on flannel sheets before because Max thought grass was his main course for the night!

So there's our super duper newly organized linen closet.

Seriously, I could stick around all day, and if you are looking for so much more, make sure take her virtual house tour!

Anyone else totally IN LOVE with Ashli and her home?  Doesn't she make organizing look so fun and pretty?  I only wish I could house crash her in person some day.... ahh....

Thanks so much to Ashli for letting me get nosy and cozy in her home today! 

ATTENTION!!  Want to be featured in a Reader Space edition?  Have an awesome organizing story to share?  I am looking for projects that have made a positive impact to your life.  Please send your story and photos to iheartorganizing@gmail.com and I would heart to feature them right here, on the blog!!  Photos should be high resolution and un-editted.  Please include a description of the project, including any costs, inspiration, and how it has changed your life and routine for the better!  Oh, and no worries my friends, we will NEVER judge "before" pictures because that just wouldn't be nice!  Only love goes on at this blog!  More Info HERE.