Sweeter dreams!

As an early 5 year anniversary present to each other, my husband and I decided we couldn't wait any longer to get a new mattress! Isn't she pretty?

We bought our old mattress at The Dump. Yes, that's the name of the store, but it is actually quite fitting. They advertise highly discounted prices because they buy from businesses that are closing. In reality, they sell cheap, defective junk. I have a friend who had a similar experience. The mattress was okay at first. But when it came time to flip it top to bottom like the instructions said, we discovered the bottom wasn't even a finished surface. It was definitely not the same bed we tried in the store. Unfortunately, at that point there was nothing we could do.

After sleeping on it for 5 years, it looked like this...

We put a yardstick across it to really show how bad it was. It was sunk in 3-5 inches on each side, and the middle had a hump higher than the edges. The sinking had started before it was even a year old. And we were both having trouble sleeping through the night and/or waking up sore.

We decided to start our shopping off by learning our sleep numbers so we would know what we were looking for. They actually were closer together than we expected. With 100 being hard and 5 being soft, I am a 30, and my husband is a 40. But we aren't fans of how comfy (or pricy) Sleep Number beds are.

So, off to Sleep Experts we went! My full sized bed I bought in college that is now our guest bed is a Simmons from there. And it's a great bed! I call it "the cloud bed" because it is THAT comfy.

Our new king sized mattress we picked out is also a Simmons Beautyrest. It's sooooooo much better! And flat! The sheets stay on better too. Plus, it comes with a one year love your mattress guarantee! We even saved some money buy getting a mis-matched box spring.

We went back the next day and got new pillows too. Our old ones were too flat for our new bed. I guess our old one kind of had built in pillows after becoming so lumpy and deformed. Of course, everything got brand new allergy covers to protect it and keep us healthy. After sleeping on it for two weeks, we are definitely having sweeter dreams now!

Any amazing mattress recommendations? Do you prefer soft or hard? Memory foam or pillow top? Spill the beans in the comments.

Regift(bag)ing

I love saving gift bags to reuse them. Those guys are expensive for being nothing but a little paper and ribbon! The only problem was that my gift bag collection was taking over our guest closet and it was getting hard to quickly find what I needed. Plus, some of them were getting scrunched. So, as I grabbed a bag to wrap a baby gift, I decided to organize them all!

First, I sorted all my gift bags and threw away all of the crunched up old ones. The next step was deciding what to store them in. I didn't want to spend any money on it right now, so I went into my laundry room to grab a couple of paper grocery bags. Instead, I discovered a couple of white bags from Loft! I got really excited because they are much prettier looking! Everything fit perfectly in the bags, but I was one short. Luckily, I found a Bed Bath and Beyond gift bag that was similar. Here are the sorted and filled up bags.

I used a sharpie to label what was in each one. One holds tissue paper, gift boxes, ribbon, bows, and gift tags. The next one holds gift bags for holidays, weddings, and baby showers. The last one holds my non-specific gift bags. I labeled it miscellaneous.

The final step was putting them up on the shelf and hoping they fit... I had just enough space for them! I love it when things work out so easily like this! I hope the rest of the closet is this easy to organize (yeah right)!

As for how I store rolls of wrapping paper, I don't have very many so they are in the flimsy clear plastic box that a 4 pack I bought at Target one year came in. It stands up vertically on the floor of the closet.


How do you store your gift wrapping supplies? Do you like to reuse gift bags and tissue paper or buy new?

The power of sticking with organization

Today I organized our batteries and tape! These are a couple of items in our guest bedroom/office that definitely needed to be organized. They were both in flimsy shoeboxes that were falling apart. The tape was even sticking to the shoebox it was in.

While we were at The Container Store yesterday — I LOVE that place — we found this battery organization box for $5.99. It holds 12 AAA, 12 AA, 6 C, and 4 D batteries.


At first, I thought that was silly because it would be annoying if you had 20 AA or 8 D batteries and they didn't all fit. Then I realized we rarely have more batteries than what it holds. Plus, it keeps them in place and is compact. A quick glance tells me I need to buy some AA batteries. I was even able to tuck some watch batteries in the skinny space that makes an L shape around the C batteries.


For our tape, I just grabbed this empty Sterilite container I had lying around. It holds duct tape, packing tape, and electrical tape. We have two rolls of each, probably because we couldn't find the tape and bought more. I'm excited about no more tape sticking to a falling apart box!


These two boxes will probably stay on the shelf on the right side of our desk. I'll add a pic once the rest of the shelf is organized. Baby steps!

How do you keep your tape and batteries organized and easily accessible? Do you share my love of The Container Store?

Corralling greeting cards

I'm so excited about how I organized my greeting cards that I'm starting with an after photo! I used to save every single greeting card anyone ever gave me. My collection of cards from the past five or six years took up two photo boxes and outgrew them after Caleb was born, so there were just piles of cards on top of the boxes. I had re-read them a total of zero times, so I decided it was time for most of them to go.

I went through them all and made several piles

• Keep for sentimental reasons
  
• Keep to use parts of the design for scrapbooking
• Keep for design inspiration
• Keep because I might frame and use as art
• Trash

I was good and got rid of a lot! I think I kept 1/5 or less. Most of the sentimental ones will stay in one of the photo boxes... more what will happen to the rest in a minute. The ones I might use for scrapbooking will go with my scrapbooking supplies. The design idea ones will go with the rest of my design samples. And the ones I might frame will go with the art file I plan on creating. Not sure how it will look yet, but I need a way to store flat things that aren't currently framed and on my walls. I want to keep all of my wedding cards and baby shower/new baby cards and thought it would be helpful to group them together. So, I made them in to books! Now they are all bound together into cute little keepsakes.


I was originally going to punch holes in the corner and add a binder ring, but once I stacked the cards up I realized there were way too many! So, I just tied a ribbon around them and added tags to label them. Then they went back in a photo box, all pretty and organized.


I am also going to do this with the Christmas cards we get, starting with this year. I hadn't put this year's cards away yet, so they went straight from my card display to into a book. I did use a hole punch and binder ring for these. I also included an envelope in the back for letters and photos we received. Then I tied them up with some pretty ribbon I had lying around and a tag I cut out of cardstock. They got packed away with Christmas decorations. This way, every year as we are decorating fro Christmas we can look through all the cards we received in years past.

Now it will be so much easier to enjoy special cards and memories without digging through giant stacks.

If you are wondering how I display my Christmas cards, I use the Umbra photofalls desktop. I decided I didn't like using it for photos because it gets so dusty when left out year round and the clips dent photos. But it works perfect when I get it out once a year to hang cards on it!

Here's the project breakdown.
Supplies needed: cards, ribbon, cardstock, binder rings, pen or marker, and hole punch
Total cost: $0 for me since I already had everything (approx. $6 if you need to buy supplies)
Time spent: approx. 3.5 hours (2 hours going through cards and 1.5 hours making the books)

Are you a saver or do you throw cards away? Do you have any creative uses for old cards?