Monthly Archives: April 2015

Seasonal Closet Clean Out Tme

Spring Order Challenge Cover
Spring has {finally!} sprung, which means that many of us have set out on a spring cleaning/decluttering rampage throughout our home. Each spring, I begin with the most frequently used room in our home – the dual purpose laundry room/mud room. We are fortunate to have a large coat closet in this room, which we use not only for coat storage, but  also to store  shoes, winter accessories, and several miscellaneous items.

Since this closet sees a lot of action, it requires a high degree of weekly maintenance and a semi-annual seasonal clean-out to keep it functioning well for our family. In this post, I’ll be sharing how I prepped the closet for the spring/summer seasons, as well as a few minor tweaks I made to improve functionality in this space.

My first order of business was to launder every single winter accessory and store them away in this plastic drawer unit that lives at the bottom of the closet. I added labels to indicate which draw is designated for gloves, hats, and scarves.

Coat Closet Drawers

Second order of business…going through the coats to weed out the heavy winter coats, any coats that the kids have outgrown, or any that are no longer worn. Outgrown/unused coats will go to a local consignment store or donation center. Winter coats will be stored elsewhere for the next 6 months (more on that later in the post). While going through the coats, I also removed any wire/plastic hangers that somehow weaseled there way into the closet over the past few months and replaced them with wooden hangers. Although I am a huge fan of huggable hangers in clothing closets, I prefer wood hangers for the coat closet, since they are much less apt to break under the weight of a heavy coat.

I purchased a few water hyacinth bins from The Container Store to organize the insulated lunch bags/coolers that are stored on the upper shelf of the closet, as well as our vast collection of rain ponchos. I am a huge fan of these bins, as anyone who has taken a tour of my home can confirm. They are sturdy, inexpensive, and so pretty!

Water Hyacinth Bin 2

“An entire bin devoted to rain ponchos?” you ask. We use these all spring and summer for sporting events, camping trips, and amusement park outings. So yes, an entire bin for rain ponchos.

Water Hyacinth Bin 1

Voila! The hardest working closet in the house is now fully functioning for the spring/summer season. Bring. It. On.

Coat Closet Clean Up

There’s still the matter of where to store those pesky out-of-season coats. This is a yearly conundrum that I haven’t yet solved. I’ve tried to store them under the bed, but the low profile of the bed frame makes it nearly impossible to slide them under. But..wait! Perhaps there’s an organizing product out there that can solve this problem…

Ziploc Space Bags

Why yes there is. Have you heard of Ziploc Space Bags? These wondrous inventions enable you to triple or quadruple your storage capacity by vacuum-sealing your items into an airtight bag. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes. I used the XL Flat Bag to reduce my pile of winter coats from this:

Winter Coat Pile

down to this:

Ziploc Space Bag Winter Coats

The true test was whether the flattened bag could actually clear the 4″ space between the bed frame and the floor:

Ziploc Space Bag Under Bed 1

Yes! Storage conundrum solved!

Ziploc Space Bag Under Bed 2

After that victory, I became ambitious and experimented with the L and XL Cube-sized Space Bags in an attempt to recoup some storage space in our hall linen closet (which has become overrun with decorative pillows and down comforters).

Space Bag Pillows

Wait for it…

Space Bag Pillows 2

O.K., so the vacuum-sealed package isn’t exactly pretty, but it takes up significantly less space! In fact, by using 3 of these bags I gained almost an entire shelf of space in the linen closet! I’m officially a fan of the Ziploc Space Bag.

Linen Closet Before and After

I hope that this post inspires you to complete your seasonal closet clean out in preparation for the spring/summer months. Now go forth and organize!

 Want to learn more about Natalie Gallagher or Refined Rooms?  Visit www.RefinedRoomsLLC.com or connect via: Facebook | Pinterest | Twitter | LinkedIn

Disclosure: Some of the links in the post above are affiliate links. This means that if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and/or with my clients and believe will add value to my readers. 

Make Tax Organizing Less Taxing with These 4 Apps

Tax Preparation

Image © Depositphotos.com/miflippo

During the month of March, a number of professional organizers shared their top tips for tax time preparation on the NAPO Get Organized Blog. A common theme that emerges across the various blog posts is the need to keep up with your tax document organizing and record-keeping on a regular basis so that you avoid the overwhelm associated with tackling all of it in one giant batch process session during the beginning of each year.

I could not agree more with this! As a recovering “batch processor”, I can tell you that doing a little bit of tax organizing on a regular basis makes the entire tax preparation process significantly less stressful.

As most readers know by now, I am a bit of a techie; whenever possible, I like to use technology-based solutions to automate processes, work in a mobile environment, and keep the paper in my life to a minimum. Today, I’d like to share some technology-based solutions that I use in order to keep on top of my tax record-keeping on a regular basis throughout the year.

1. MileBug Mileage Tracker App

As a business owner, keeping track of my mileage is a necessity. Even if you do not own a business, you may choose to track your mileage for work reimbursement purposes, or for claiming a tax deduction for medical expenses and/or volunteer work. The MileBug app is my method of choice for capturing all of this information.

milebug 2

MileBug enables me to track and classify every trip I take with my vehicle, using either a manual entry odometer method, or GPS tracking. At any time, I can generate and email mileage reports to myself (or my accountant) in either an HTML or Excel-readable format. I can also back up my data to iTunes or other cloud storage services so that I won’t lose my information, even if I lose my device.

Tracking mileage is not easily accomplished in an end-of-year mega marathon documentation session. It really needs to be tracked on a daily basis, and utilizing a mileage tracking app such as MileBug makes the process infinitely easier.

2. It’s Deductible Donation Tracker App

Have you ever sat down with a stack of Goodwill donation receipts that spanned the previous 12 months and attempted to itemize every book, clothing and household item you donated? It’s not fun.

tax organizing 6

I used to itemize all of the charitable deduction information when I sat down to complete my taxes each year. After attempting to itemize the 8th donation drop-off receipt, I would throw up my hands and declare that the tax deduction was not worth the aggravation of of itemizing…can you relate? Even if I was willing to persist through this frustrating task until the last donation receipt was processed, the accuracy of the information would likely be questionable. After all, would I truly be able to remember each item that was in that box of “housewares” from 8 months ago?

So I got wise, capitalized on my penchant for a cool app, and downloaded It’s Deductible. The rest is history.

It’s Deductible actually makes record-keeping fun! It is available as both a web application and a mobile app. It provides a means of tracking cash donations, and household goods donations. For more information on how it works, see my blog post on keeping organized charitable contribution records.

Its Deductible app

When I am able to see my estimated tax savings after entering itemized donations each month, it provides all the incentive I need to keep up with this tax organizing maintenance task.

Its Deductible app 2

3. CamScanner App

Managing receipts is a necessary evil in the world of tax documentation. Business-related expenses, big ticket item purchases, medical expenses, home improvement expenses…all require a supporting document to legitimately claim those coveted tax deductions. A receipt typically serves that purpose. Trouble is, receipts fade, get lost, and create a tremendous amount of paper clutter in our homes.

In an effort to circumvent all of these challenges, I choose to scan my receipts as often as possible (yes, the IRS does accept electronic copies of documents). Oftentimes, I’ll use my Fujitzu Scansnap Scanner to transform receipts into electronic documents. When I’m not at my home office, I use the CamScanner app to quickly capture a receipt while on the go.

camscanner 1

This app basically transforms my smartphone into a portable scanner that creates both PDF or JPG documents that I can either email to myself or send directly to the appropriate folder in my Dropbox account. I then kiss that annoying piece of paper goodbye.

The maintenance task of scanning and filing electronic receipts is typically something I do daily. When my schedule reaches “crazy” level, I might batch process a week’s worth of receipts at a time.

4. GoDaddy Bookkeeping App

As a business owner, I like to have up-to-date information regarding my company’s financial information at my fingertips at all times. This enables me to clearly see where the business money is being spent, what my profit/loss cycles look like over the course of the year, how much I’ll have to pay in estimated taxes each quarter, etc. Having access to this data enables me to make good decisions.

I use GoDaddy Bookkeeping as my accounting program, and the accompanying GoDaddy Bookkeeping app to have access to my information on my mobile devices. It imports and organizes all of my business account information into a central location and enables me to generate income and expense reports.

Godaxdy bookkeeping 2

The beauty of this application is that there is very little manual data to input, since it pulls transactions directly from my bank account. The one exception is my mileage data, which I enter manually from the report I generate from MileBug on a monthly basis.

I invite you to test out one or more of these apps in order to make organizing your tax information a less taxing process for next year!

Want to learn more about Natalie Gallagher or Refined Rooms?  Visit www.RefinedRoomsLLC.com or connect via: Facebook | Pinterest | Twitter | LinkedIn