Jars and Organising

My regimented jars of all the things that were once languishing in the bottom of 'The Drawer ' (everyone has one)...

A Place for Everything.

The phrase "A place for everything and everything has its place."

While being super annoying does really help when you're trying to be slightly less chaotic. I have the misfortune to be a neat-freak trapped in the body of an untidy person. My family are just really untidy, all of them. 

It’s a constant and mostly losing battle to try and keep some order in our house.

I also have a brain like a sieve so when I came up with the idea of painting a giant blackboard on our kitchen chimney breast to to note down all the essentials I was likely to forget (like my name), I needed to find a way of not constantly losing the chalk. 

A wall painted with blackboard paint is nicer than an actual blackboard as it has some texture. 

Chalk boxes aren’t very pretty and they’re small so easy to misplace. 

So I put shelves on the blackboard for my chalk jar and having had a great success in NOT LOSING THE CHALK because it was in big jar on it’s own special shelf, I added the other essentials we seemed to spend approximately 20% of our lives looking for:

Rubbers and sharpeners

Pencils

Pens that work

crayons

Sometimes these kind of ideas look cute in a photo shoot but don’t really work in a real home, but this really is a great solution to The Great Stationery Hunt. Everyone can see where to find it and occasionally they’ll even put it back and when you find yourself looking longingly at a packet of penguin shaped rubbers, or a Homer Simpson pencil sharpener (we have both) you have the perfect excuse to buy them - they’ll look great in The Jar.

Central control. A calendar (out of shot) hangs between the two shelves with all play dates, outings, deadlines etc.. noted on it and everyone can leave messages on the blackboard, usually it's 'buy peanut butter.'

In the unlikely event that you don’t recognize them, these are Burken jars from IKEA 

The lovely photos were taken by my friend Sarah

www.sarahgarrod.co.uk