Home Organization: Engineering Style

John and I received some awesome tools at a surprise wedding shower from Morrow Bible Church here in Ohio. It was great to get so many useful items that I may end up using as much as John! Since we're both engineers, I've probably had more experience with tools than the average girl.

Well, as both an engineer and someone who has organized stockrooms and areas at work with bins, my first thought at trying to organize these items was to use stocking bins! I found some online and with some wedding gift money I ordered 25 (more than I thought I would need). I intended to organize not only the tools, but also my bathroom items.
I thought I would stack bins in this closet with these bathroom items, but ended up placing most of the bins under the sink - freeing up an entire shelf!
I guess it's strange to post a picture under your sink, but now you know where to find extra tp if you need it:)

I put the tools in our pantry area in the kitchen. My before picture didn't wasn't zoomed out enough as I ended up using more shelf space than I thought!

I enjoy organizing. Now for the hard part - keeping it organized!

We had a good weekend looking for apartments and then visiting Doug and Lori in Sandusky where she was visiting her mom. That was a lot of fun - eventually we may post some pictures from that visit.

I've been busy finishing up a wedding photo album on shutterfly. I just hit the order button and it feels awesome to have that done. I'm hoping it will arrive before the camping trip so I can bring it with me are share it with anyone who's not tired of those pictures yet! I made it the maximum size (101 pages!) and had fun organizing all the pictures from friends through our honeymoon. Since I've been going strong on wedding pictures for so long, I may wait a bit before posting any more here.

Early Monday morning I had an odd experience waking up with terrible back pain. It was so nice to have John right there with me to talk with - what a blessing not to have to face things alone! My back has been hurting some for the last several days, but not that bad. I think I pulled a muscle and maybe the bed is a little soft for a sore back. I finally fell back to sleep on the floor. Last night we slept on a little firmer mattress (the sofa bed) which was fine. I'm hoping that after a few days my back will be back to normal.

Lazy Saturday

I haven't been great about posting very often recently. I guess it seems like there's not a whole lot new going on. Lets, see . . . today was a nice relaxing day. I ran this morning (but not fast), made fudge (found that a candy thermometer makes all the difference in the world - thanks Trisha!), sat by a moon bounce thing this afternoon until rained out, then took a nap before supper. Not exactly the kind of exciting day one wants to blog about!

This week at work somewhat of a transformation occurred. Our company is being sold to a private investment group and they are visiting this week. So, we got to 5S everywhere. For us in engineering, that meant that we cleaned up our engineering testing area as well as our offices. We were able to purchase a couple cabinets for our stuff so for the first time we actually had a place for everything. We filled the cabinets with bins and even labeled them. It actually turned out really nice and feels good to have easy access to all our stuff. I don't think my office have ever been so clean. I was able to take many of my important parts and old versions of our products and move them down to storage boxes in our newly organized engineering area. I don't know if the organized look will last, but I hope that it will.