I’m still here plugging away at my organizing tasks, one small step at a time. This week I decided to tackle a long-time nemesis, receipt clutter, and found a delightfully simple solution.

For my own simple purposes, I have three categories of receipts:

1. Business receipts
2. Big-ticket purchase rceipts
3. Everything else

I have good systems in place for the first two categories:

• Business receipts go straight to the tax folder or, in the case of reimbursable client purchases, into the client folder to await the next invoice. Easy-peasy.
• Big-ticket purchase receipts get taped to the instruction manual or a large sheet of paper and placed in a folder labeled, oddly enough, “big ticket items”. (I never said I was particularly creative.)

Those work well for me, month in and month out.

For that third category, Everything Else, I’ve played with different methods but hadn’t found a really sustainable solution. Whether I used a file folder, an envelope, a plastic bin, or whatever, I still ended up with receipts tucked in every nook and cranny of my desk and purse. Receipts both old and new were all intermixed in these little tucked away bunches. Messy and disorganized, not to mention totally unnecessary.

Most of my Everything Else receipts are for necessary consumables: groceries, gas, etc. Once I’ve verified they appeared correctly on my credit card statement, there’s really no need to keep them. What I really needed was a simple, short-term storage method, and I think I found it in an post on Homestead Revival. (Who said Pinterest was a waste of time?)

It is with great pleasure I give you my version of Amy’s desktop storage solution:

This was my grandfather’s tobacco jar. I remember watching with fascination as he went through his ritual of filling, tamping, lighting and then savoring his nightly puff. He seemed to spend much more time preparing than he did puffing.

I’ve had this jar for 25 years, using it to store a variety of household items. Now, it sits on my desk to hold my current month receipts. Each night, I take any receipts from my purse, and if they’re not business or big-ticket receipts, I put them straight into the jar. At the end of the month, they’ll get moved to an envelope in my desk drawer until the next month’s receipts get transferred, and then the oldest will be thrown away. No keeping them for a year (or longer)

Besides having a neater purse, I’ve found another simple pleasure in this method. I love having my grandfather’s jar on my desk! I rarely saw it when it was used for other storage, but now I see it several times a day and use it at least once. The little clink I hear when I replace the top on the jar takes me back to those long ago days of my grandfather’s nightly ritual. And that makes me happy.

Workable and practical storage solutions don’t have to be complicated. This one is certainly simple, and I’m hopeful that it continues to be both effective and enjoyable.

How do you store/organize your receipts?

I don’t bake cakes very often, but I do bake muffins and quick breads on occasion. The originator of this tip, BakedBree.com, says placing a slice of bread on top of cakes, muffins, etc. will keep them moist as they cool on the counter.

This is too easy not to try! Fingers crossed I get to bake a cake again sometime in my lifetime.

This one is embarrassingly simple. It’s also somewhat embarrassing in that it highlights how infrequently I cook.

I actually did cook the other day and needed a trivet to put a hot pot on, only I couldn’t remember where I put my trivets. So I grabbed the next best thing: a cake cooling rack.

Not a great photo, but you get the idea. The rack keeps the hot pot from damaging the cabinet, and that’s really all I needed.

I really do have trivets, though, and I’ll be keeping them (assuming I find them) for use when company is here.

One thing a heat wave is good for is enabling me to catch up with my reader!

HOME
All That’s Frozen Isn’t Good [Lonely Gourmet]

As a committed batch-and-freeze cook, I’m forever discovering a freezer container that has worked its way to the back of the shelf to hide, and then I have to wonder, “Is this still good?” This article has some good tips for freezing foods.

RECIPES
No-Knead Bread [The Smitten Kitchen]

Easy, but time-consuming recipe. Well worth the effort, though. I made bread this week and detailed the experience on The Tippy Toe Diet, but here’s a little peek at my results:

If I can do it (even with errors), anyone can!

FINANCE & FRUGALITY
Why You Shouldn’t Trust the Better Business Bureau [Lazy Man and Money]

The first thing I do when I want to check out a business or repair person is hit the BBB site. According to this article, the BBB isn’t as reliable and impartial as I thought!

PRODUCTIVITY
But I Don’t Want To: Secrets to Self-Motivation [Wisebread]

As so often happens, this appeared in my reader on a day I really needed it. Good advice in a well-written article.

SELF

Sometimes a simple quote teaches me more than any article or essay.

MADE ME SMILE

Source: aplacetolovedogs.com via Cammy on Pinterest

Wishing you all a wonderful week ahead!

I’m taking advantage of some mild-for-Memphis weather to knock out a few outdoor projects this week. Here are a couple of tips I’ll be trying for the first time:

My patio cushions are mildew-free (thank goodness!), but they could do with some freshening. I’m going to try a trick I heard about that involves stuffing the cushions in a large trash bag along with some kitty litter (unused!) and seal it up for a couple days. Supposedly the carbon in the litter will absorb odors. We’ll soon see!

I’ve got a couple (or three) paint projects here that were waiting for warmer weather. I like painting, so that’s no problem. What is a problem is that the warmer weather brings bugs–bugs that like to land upon my freshly painted surfaces! Last week, when I was at the hardware store, I overheard a tip that may help with that. Supposedly, adding a few drops of citronella oil to a gallon of paint will to keep the insects away and won’t affect the paint finish. *Fingers crossed!*

Have you had any experience with either of these two tips? Or do you have another method you’d like to share?

I eat tomatoes year-round, but there’s nothing as good as a summer tomato! Thanks to the unusually warm spring, we’re already seeing market tomatoes from farther down south, and they are delicious! The only thing that makes me happier is knowing that my father has 57 tomato plants in the ground and is more than willing to share his harvest.

In honor of the early start to tomato season, I’ll share a couple of my favorite tomato tips!

If you’re fortunate enough to have an abundance of tomatoes, as I will, and want to can them, prep is super easy! Just cut a small X in the bottom of each tomato, plop (no splash!) into a pot of boiling water for a minute, then move them to an ice bath. The skins will practically jump off! Well, with a little coaxing from a sharp knife.

If you’ve picked or purchased some slightly less ripe tomatoes, place them in a warm window a day or two before you plan to use them to heighten the flavor.





Do you share my tomato love?

I’ve gone and done it now! I just committed to participate in the neighborhood garage sale event–in TWO WEEKS! Yikes!

It’s not like I haven’t been planning to have a garage sale; I just hadn’t put a date on it. Which is, of course, why it hasn’t happened yet.

Anyway, I thought it was a good time to review my list of garage sale tips and then then thought I’d go one step further and share them with you! Keep in mind that these are tips that have worked for me in the Memphis area; your area of the world might be different.

Tips for a Successful Garage Sale

Before the Sale

Most of the real work for a garage sale occurs before the actual sale date.

Pick the date. Well duh. That seems a little obvious, but there are some dates that are more lucrative (potentially) than others. Saturdays seem to have the biggest draw, and those that occur around the 1st or 15th of the month (traditional U.S. paydays) are especially busy. Our May 5th sale is positioned nicely on the calendar.
Choose your start and end times. Know that garage sale people are notorious for showing up on your doorstep at 5:00 a.m. No kidding. At one of our neighborhood sales, I had to chase away shoppers from my neighbor’s house. They had pulled into her driveway and were using their car headlights to poke around her sale items, which were covered with a tarp! Sheesh. If you don’t want folks showing up early, you’ll want to say so in any advertisements. Which leads us nicely to our next tip…
Choose your advertising. Local newspapers are a good bet, but the ad will cost you. The last time I checked, our local paper charged $30 for a 3-day ad. A better (and more profitable) option is craigslist, which is free! Wherever you advertise, be sure to include the following info:

• your sale date
• address (you’d be amazed at how many people forget that)
• the start and completion times of the sale
• any ‘rainy day’ plans
• any major items you have to draw shoppers in
• I usually include an ‘early birds pay double’ warning, or simply ‘no early birds, please’. I like to think it helps.

Plant signs! Signs are another good advertising tool. A few notes about signs:

• Use lots and lots of signs. Cover every nearby major intersection and post them along the route through your subdivision. (Be sure to ask permission of homeowners and businesses first and always remove them at the end of the sale!)
• If you choose a single color (lime green, hot pink, day-glo yellow) for all your signs, shoppers can more easily find their way to YOUR sale. (And they’ll really, really appreciate your efforts!)
• Please–PLEASE–write in large block letters with a marker. I’m sorry if your address is really long, but let that factor into the size poster board you buy. I’m not getting out of my car, crossing six lanes of traffic, and pulling your sign up off the ground so that I can read your address. I’m not!
• If you live in a humid area (hello, fellow Memphians!), buy foam core boards, not plain poster board. The poster variety will do nothing but curl up and hide all your info. Also, you’ll want to wait until the morning of the sale to put out your signs.(See previous warnings about early birds.)

Assemble your sale items. Go through every place you can think of to gather items for the sale and collect them in a common area. Then go through those spaces again. And again, if you need it. You want to avoid that mad midnight-dash on the eve of the sale as you spot more things to be sold. Trust.Me.

Clean your sale items. Please don’t take something layered in 15 years of attic dust and plop it on a table. People don’t want to leave your sale feeling like they need a shower. Or maybe that’s just me. One thing’s for certain, you’ll stand a better chance of attracting buyers and getting top dollar if your items are clean.

Price your items. Please. I know it’s tedious, but as a garage sale shopper, I also know that nothing is more frustrating than having to ask a price for every single item. In fact, I usually leave those sales right away. You should plan to mark each item, although you can group items like books and CDs and put up a single sign for those.

A good rule of thumb to start is 25% of what it sells for retail if–and this is a big IF–the item is in pristine condition. It’s more likely that you’ll end up getting somewhere between 10-20%. If things aren’t selling, you can always put up a 50% off everything. (That’s especially useful as the sale winds to a close.)

Map out your sale space. How many tables will you need? Where can you get them? How can you improvise? I’m lucky in that I have access to several banquet tables and card tables, but I’ve also used two kitchen chairs with a board between them for shoes and handbags. I’ve also used empty moving boxes turned upside down to hold luggage. I try to keep as much off the ground as possible, although if I had a bunch of kids’ toys, the ground is exactly where I’d put them! Pint-sized customers need to see the goods! It’s also a good idea to rig a way to hang up your clothes, especially any of your “nicer” items. Collect all of these display tools and have them ready before the sale.

Save bags and boxes. This is tougher to do these days with so many of us using canvas for our shopping needs, but it’s helpful to have a few plastic or paper bags and a few extra boxes on hand for large purchases.

Get change. You’re going to need to make change for all the big bills you’re bringing in, so make a trip to the bank in the days before the sale. I usually get about $100 in smaller bills, mostly $1′s and $5′s, and a roll of quarters. That seems to work well, but be ye warned that you will get some bozo (or bozette) in there at 6:00 a.m. who will smile as she hands you a twenty and holds up a 25-cent item. I decline those sales, but I smile sweetly as I do so and offer to hold it for an hour if she wants to get some change elsewhere. Later in the day, it’s a different story, but anyone out shopping that early is probably a garage sale hound and should have known better.

Assemble the tools of the trade: a measuring tape for measuring furniture and such, an extension cord for testing appliances, your change box (or a carpenter’s apron, which is what I use), a calculator if you’re not math-handy, and a notebook and pen just in case.

Get breakfast. Seriously. Plan for whatever it is you’re going to have for breakfast the night before. That way you won’t be caught off-guard by early birds and find yourself famished at 9 a.m.

Day of the sale

Get up early and get moving! Enough said. (Oh, remember the breakfast thing.) Set up tables and put out previously-priced items. Group like items together (housewares, tools, books, etc.) Consider putting a “eye-catcher” item near the curb to draw people in.

Put out your signs. This is where a helper comes in handy.

Take a deep breath and smile a lot. Be open to meeting your neighbors, as well as a few folks you hope forget they ever saw your neighborhood.

After the sale

For any usable items, the Goodwill or other donation centers will appreciate your donations. For things not in working order, consider placing them at your curb with a ‘free to good home’ sign.

Put your feet up and congratulate yourself for a job well done!

Your turn! Any savvy sellers out there who can help us out here? I’m sure I’ve left out a lot.