Thursday, May 27, 2010

Getting Organized!

If your wedding planning journey has been anything like ours, your home has probably been taken over by boxes and boxes of wedding stuff. For the last 7 months or so, it feels like every other day we're getting packages in the mail!

See exhibit A, our living room as of last weekend (aka our pool table and entertaining room, thank goodness we have a family room too, where we watch TV and I have another room to trash while working on crafts!).
(we haven't been able to play pool since 2009, with all the boxes on top of the table)

(having a path to actually get out of your living room and to the front door is overrated!)

So I made it my mission to get our house and wedding stuff organized! With less than 3 weeks until the wedding, it was finally time to stop buying things, and start getting things in order for taking to the various wedding events.

Our old furniture was already shoved into a corner from when I did our fauxtobooth mock up, so I had a free wall to work with. I started by boxing up everything, and made detailed set up instructions sheets that I put into each box. Since we're relying on our DOC, family and friends to do the majority of the set up, I wanted to make it as easy as possible for them to quickly figure out where to put things around our venue.

I also made labels for every single box, describing what's in the box, if there are multiple boxes with the same items (i.e. calling out box 1 of 2), and a quick note on where the contents go. Hopefully this will make unloading the Uhaul full of boxes go quickly, and make it easy to find everything.

I put half sheet notes on the boxes that are still missing things, and those will remain untaped until we track down a few remaining things, but all in all, we've got just about everything boxed and set up instructions printed out, except our cupcake stand, which we'll do next weekend.

After all the organizing, I was able to separate out all the many boxes into several piles, and clean off our pool table so we could stuff our OOT boxes. We went to Costco for the contents and ended up putting 2 water bottles, beef or turkey jerky, gum, advil, the info packet, and 2 bags of chips in each box.
See? Look how clean (ish) now!
Of course, I didn't just make it all disappear, but at least all of the wedding stuff is in organized piles now!

Wedding party gifts, wrapped by Mr. C in extra OOT gable boxes:
Two piles of rehearsal dinner decor and drinks:
(Thirsty anyone? Hopefully 4 cases of beer, 16 bottles of wine, 24 water bottles and 3 packs of soda will be enough! But any leftovers will get used at our after party and/or Sunday luncheon)

A big pile of all the wedding decor, except the cupcake stand:

After party supplies (mainly boxes of liquor and mixers, plus Mr. Cola's remote controlled beer cooler robot):

And a lot of champagne for the Sunday luncheon (we'll pick up beer on the morning-of, since there won't be room in our cars for anything more than we've already bought until that morning!)

OOT boxes all ready to go (Along with a print out of the email from the hotel confirming they won't charge to hand out the boxes. You can never be too careful!)
And a look at all the organized piles (come on, I know you all love looking at piles of my wedding junk!).

Ok, well, I had a grand vision before I started all this that our living room/dining room would look totally better, all cleaned and organized. And it IS, but there's still a LOT of stuff everywhere. Oh well, not much we can do about that until the Wednesday before our wedding, when we'll be loading it all into our 10ft Uhaul and into the trunks of both our cars.

(Yes, that is a giant kitty jungle gym along the back wall. After 6 years and 3 moves, they desperately need us to build them a new one, which is on our "after wedding" DIY projects list)

But it still feels good to be organized, even if it doesn't look like it!

Have you taken steps to organize all your wedding supplies and decor you've accumulated?

4 comments:

  1. Wow, look at all the space you have! I think you did a great job cleaning up.

    Right now I am stuffing all of our wedding projects into these weird storage banquettes we have in our apartment. I ran out of room there fast, so a corner of the "man cave," aka my fiance's computer/stereo room, has been invaded. 5 months and many, many projects to go, and so little room left . . .

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  2. I had the same problem. I stored a bunch of stuff in the basement but as the wedding got closer I needed to be able to work on stuff and organize everything. So everything settled in the dining room. Now the wedding is over and everything is back in the dining room waiting to be sold and our bedroom is full of shower and wedding gifts waiting to be unpacked.

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  3. I'm in the process of doing this. I think I'll feel so much better once it's done!

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  4. My place isn't taken over like that yet, but I'm pretty early in the planning stages. Maybe I should start cleaning out my closet now...

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