Kids Cleaning Buckets (and a HUGE Give Away!)

I posted my cleaning schedule last week when I shared my cleaning closet redo and some of you were curious if my girls help with the household work.

Evie helps out too, but my two older girls are old enough to do some real cleaning as part of their weekly chores. To make their chores a little more exciting (a stretch, I know!) and to give them more ownership, the girls and I decided they needed their own cleaning kits. So we went to Home Depot together and shopped for some supplies to make the kits. We found a huge display with duct tape in all different colors and we thought that would make a cute (and waterproof!) decoration for simple white buckets.

We also picked up some colorful nylon cording.

The girls and I worked together to wrap the buckets in layers of the duct tape. If you roll the bucket while pulling the tape really taut, there won't be any air bubbles or wrinkles.

Then we used a hot glue gun to wrap the handles in the nylon cording.

It's surprising to me how putting in even a little extra effort to make something beautiful gives a household item so much more importance. My girls love these buckets and they've been diligently doing their chores lately! Success!

The Home Depot and P&G want to give away a few things today so one of you readers can kick start your own cleaning and organizing project! To enter to win a $200 gift card to The Home Depot along with some cleaning products including Febreze Air Effects, Bounty Select-A-Size and Charmin Ultra Soft, simply leave a comment on this post and share what project you have in mind. Or share what you do to help get your kids excited to help cleaning!

And don't forget to check out all the great blogger projects here to get yourself inspired!

DIY Necklace Hanger

We decided to block out our weekend and we've got nothing planned but house projects! I am so excited to share one big one in particular (photos coming!), but one small project I want to tackle is making a second one of these little necklace holders I did for my first Domino article project.

I'm running out of space and my necklaces are getting buried, which sort of defeats the purpose of the thing. The good news is it's really, really easy to make one of these hangers and only takes a few minutes, so I can turn a second one of these out in 20 minutes or so.

My inspiration came from this photo below I saw on a cool site that just shares images of closets belonging to really stylish women. I can't remember the name of the site though - do you know it?

In this woman's closet, she use a strip of wood and a series of nails tapped right in. This hanger would be like a five minute project!

I wanted my necklace strip to be painted the same color as my wardrobe units (which is Benjamin Moore's Knoxville Gray), and I wanted tiny brass hooks.

I had a scrap piece of wood laying around that was just the right size. I don't have a photo of this, but I bought some of those picture hangers that you just tap right into wood or a frame. They sort of look like jagged teeth? They're great and so easy to use. After installing those on the back, I painted a first coat on, then I marked out where the hooks would be on the front, spacing them about an inch apart and staggering the rows.

Then I drilled teeny tiny pilots holes with the smallest bit I have. This made screwing in the small hooks by hand about a million times easier!

I touched up the paint with a small brush and then hung the strip of hooks up on the wardrobe wall using the jagged teeth hangers.

The teeth hangers sort of make the strip tilt out a bit, but I kind of like the angle? Or at least it doesn't bother me enough to figure out another way to hang the strip!

What plans do you guys have for the weekend? Any big projects? Here's a sneak peek of what I've got going on... :)

My Cleaning Closet Overhaul!

While it is fun in some ways to live in a house where we can stretch out a little more and the kids and the dog can run around more freely, I'm learning a bigger house sort of just means there's more to clean! :) I use a cleaning schedule that really helps, but I was feeling like I needed a central command station.

So over the holidays, I joined forces with seven other bloggers also anxious to get their homes organized in 2014. I decided to have a little fun with the closet under the stairs, formerly known as the Harry Potter closet/closet of no return/most embarrassing place for guests to mistake as a coat closet.

Shield your eyes!!

Christmas decor. Amazon boxes. A wadded up air mattress? Random cleaning supplies. Lists. Receipts. Leftover flooring nails. Home Depot bags that may or may not actually have useful things inside. This is my life, people. Help!

The first step was a good clean-out. Then I headed right over to my fabric stash and pulled out what I had left of this pretty Quadrille fabric. I found it at a fabric warehouse a few years ago and had used it for a custom shower curtain (it's an acetate fabric).

The colors are so pretty! Orange and turquoise and olive with just a bit of plum.

I wanted a bright blue paint color for the walls and went with Sky Watch from The Home Decorators Collection line at Home Depot.

I also picked up just a few (!!!) extra things for the project while I was there.

I painted the walls in a flat enamel.

Then I added flat trim to the shelf fronts, to make them look thicker. I also added baseboards to the closet. It's amazing how much more finished the room looked after adding baseboards!

Then I painted the shelves the same color as the walls, but in a high gloss.

I left the back wall white though. No need to waste paint there.

Using the same technique I used to upholster a wall in our old loft here, I roughly cut the Quadrille fabric to size and then I stapled and stretched it, and stapled it again on the back wall.

After all the staples were in, I trimmed off the excess fabric.

I tried to be mindful of the pattern the whole time, so that everything would line up in the right way.

Then I covered the staples using cotton twill tape from Joanns and some copper upholstery nails.

To dress up the fronts of the now-thicker shelves, and to help keep things organized, I picked up a package of these metal label holders in the scrapbooking section of my local craft store. I spray painted them gold to get a brass look.

I used black carpet tacks to hang the label-holders on the shelves.

It's really easy to keep everything where it should be with the labels on the shelves.

There used to be some plastic hooks on the wall to the left here, but I took those down in favor of this mop-and-broom-clamp-holder-thing (that's the official name).

I keep our broom and dustpan here and my new Swiffer SteamBoost mop, which I love for our bathroom and kitchen floors especially. I seriously use it every day. We put in winter grass this year, and it's been nothing but mud all over my floors for months. I love Linus like a son, but man, that dog tracks mud in all day long. It's a good thing he's so cute and sweet. :)

I also bought one of these screw-in plastic-dipped hooks from Home Depot and I installed it right into my shelving to help keep my vacuum's hose up off the floor. Works like a charm!

It is so fun to have a pretty little space to keep all my cleaning and paper products now.

Now when people accidentally open this door to hang up their coats, I'm like, oh that? That's just my cleaning closet. NBD. #boombaby #organized4lyf

For more organizing and spring cleaning tips head on over to FinditatHomeDepot.com, where seven fab bloggers are sharing their great cleaning and organizing projects.

This post was brought to you by The Home Depot and P&G. Start Clean in '14!