A Simplier Place In Time: Amish Country

This past weekend I took a little trip home to join my family on an outing to Amish Country. For those of you that have never heard of Amish Country, let me tell you, it is a really neat place! Amish Country is located in Ohio. 

Sugarcreek, Walnut Creek, Millersburg, & Berlin are among the most common cities that "tourist" frequent when they come here. Ohio is actually home to the world's largest Amish community. There are so many things that you can do here. You are able to enjoy the vast and beautiful scenery of farms and Amish life. Not a visit goes by without seeing at least one horse and buggy, often you will see the horses tied up outside of one of the stores where its owner is either tending to errands or simply working that 9-5. Tours of a real Amish farm are offered as well as buggy rides for the whole family. The best thing about Ohio though is their food! Nothing beats Amish home cooking. They seriously have some of the best cooking around and I would lie if I said I did not leave feeling quite full every time I visit.

This most frequent visit however, was not without its adventures. I left my house on Friday around 6am to begin the drive to my families house where we were all meeting up before taking one car on our trip. While the skies were still dark outside when I left and the morning air was quite cold and crisp upon my skin, I was happy to be making the trip to one of my favorite places. The forecast for the day was a high of 50 degrees with rain and snow only in the morning hours. Upon arriving at my parents house, the sky was brightening and there wasn't a rain cloud in sight. My nephew, who will be three in a few short months, informed me that "he wasn't going to go trick or treating because it was Easter and the bunny was going to bring him candy." Oh how I miss the stories he tells. He is starting to have quite the imagination! 

His stories and songs kept us all quite cheery as we started on our two hour drive. Shortly into the drive however, the weather shifted and we began to see some slight flurries. No problem we thought, some flurries and rain were called for, surely it would pass. Not long after, the snow began to fall harder and the roads were quickly covered. Our car slid to a stop as the roads turned icy. We were literally in the middle of a white out and the snow was coming down hard...we pressed on however, certain it had to stop and a sunny day would be upon us. 

While the snow eventually did halt and the air warmed a bit I can honestly say it was the craziest thing! By the time we made it to our first stop there was barely any sign that mere hours earlier there had been a large amount of snow fall. Weather can be quite odd sometimes. But, we were happy to now be able to fully enjoy our day.

Our first stop was Sols. This is a very large building, two stories actually that is filled with handcrafted items. I ended up purchasing two candles for $9 each and they smell amazing! I have them burning currently and my whole house smells like a delicious bakery! I also picked up a floral Spring sprig for my dining room table and love the way it looks with the white vase I recently picked up from Goodwill.

Now, a trip to Ohio is never complete without enjoying dinner at our favorite restaurant: Der Dutchman.For as long as I can remember, every trip made to Ohio has ended at this very spot. The food is AMAZING! Nothing beats good ole' Amish home cooking. My favorite dinner and the one I always  seem to get includes:  oven roasted turkey, crisp hash browns, and an order of fries. Of course the meal wouldn't be complete without their amazing BBQ sauce and a tall cold glass of chocolate milk to wash it all down. Yum! I am not a huge milk drinker but I absolutely love their chocolate milk! 

 

 After a delicious dinner at Der Dutchman we head next door to their bakery. Here you can pick up lots of the same items they serve in their restaurant, including their famous bread and rolls. While I can no longer enjoy these items, thanks to my gluten intolerance, I still make sure to pick up a pack of rolls for my husband. One of us needs to enjoy these and while I wish it was me, at least my husband is able to. They really are amazing! They are soft and fluffy and with a little bit of their homemade butter, they are to die for! 

 Now if you head down the street a little ways you will come across the Coblentz Chocolate Store. There is one item I always pick up when we go there: their mini chocolate buckeyes! For those of you who watch my grocery haul videos, you will know I always refer to Aldi peanut butter cups as addicting, well these little buckeyes are just as addicting if not more so. It is a good thing I only go up to Ohio a few times throughout the year. Combine the amazing food from Der Dutchman with the Buckeyes from the candy store and my waistline would be in for some serious trouble haha  

Another stop that has amazing food (have you noticed a pattern yet haha) is Heini's Cheese Factory. You guessed it, they have amazing cheese lol.One really cool thing about Heini's is that you can actually go on tours and see how their cheese is made. They also do not use preservatives in many of their products. Yep, you get the real deal when you come here.

I always like to stock up on cheese when I go as well as grab a big bag of beef jerky for my husband. Nothing is better than homemade beef jerky. Yum! While it is pricey ($17.99 per lb) it is worth every penny. 

Overall, it was a great weekend and I am so glad I got to spend it with my family, who unfortunately I don't get too see that often. I returned home with wonderful memories, a stuffed belly, and enough treats to last us for quite awhile! Oh who am I kidding, they will be gone in a couple days hehe.

 If you haven't already, you can watch the video below where I share all of the amazing things I picked up during my trip. 

Until next time...

21 Day Organization Challenge: Day 20 & 21

Ok Ok so I know this might be cheating but I am counting one project as two days worth of projects. Call me a cheater lol but this was a BIG project. In the past I have organized and re-organized our closet in our office. However, there were soooooooo many things in the closet that it just never looked organized and even when it was it never lasted for too long. One huge reason it wasn't working for us is because we simply had too much stuff in there. While our closets are pretty large, we found ourselves storing so many things in there that should have been tossed a long time ago. I am talking empty boxes, old computers, etc. Well, we finally decided we needed to do something about the mess! So, you are probably wondering, aside from the old computers and empty boxes, what the heck are we keeping in there! Well, a lot of different things lol We use this closet as our garage to hold all of our tools & painting supplies. It also is where we store our seasonal items, I have a bin for Spring, Fall, Summer and of course 3 huge totes for Christmas decor. We also keep all of Colby's caving and camping supplies in the closet as well. Colby has a TON of outdoor supplies haha including his backpack, tent, and caving equipment. So you can see why this project is worthy of two whole days and let me tell you, it actually took us longer than two days to work on this project. To keep it from feeling overwhelmeing we broke it down into an hour here an hour there over the course of a week. This helped us to have a fresh mind when looking at this space. One of the very first things we did was remove EVERYTHING from the closet. This is the first time we have done that since putting it all in. Sure I organized the closet here and there but I never completely removed everything, shelving an all, before.

So, I know what you all really came here for. Before and After photos. So let's take a look shall we. 

This is an overall look at our closet before and after. One huge change is the fact that I now put all of our seasonal decor on the top shelf. Now all of my Christmas bins and seasonal bins as well as our Christmas tree stay together. Things we use more frequently like tools, paint, and camping supplies stayed on the floor.

The shelving unit in our closet originally came from Walmart. It was only $20 or $25 and has been holding up pretty well considering how much weight has been placed on it. As you can see there is a huge difference between the photos. All of Colby's camping supplies were removed from the shelving unit and placed back in his camping bag. This freed up space to put other items. 

Looking the the right corner of the closet, you can see in the first photo this is originally where all of our Christmas supplies were held. In moving them to the top shelf, this allowed the back corner to be the perfect spot to store our camping bag and equipment as well as our grill that we only use during the Summer. 

Fianlly, a look at the top shelf in our closet. As I mentioned earlier this is where we are now storing all of our Christmas and seasonal decor. I love the way it looks and love that it is now all in one spot.

Alright, so there you go folks. Our 21 day challenge is officially over. I am happy to say that I now have more organized areas in my home and so happy I took part in this challenge. Thank you to everyone who participated, I really appreciate it and I hope you have some organized spaces in your home now.

Until next time! 

21 Day Organization Challenge: Day 18 & 19

I first want to apologize for having these blog posts up late. I am still getting used to posting every day, this is something quite new for me and I  imagine it takes some time to get the hang of it. With that being said, it is time to knock out the last few projects in the 21 day organization challenge. First, as a pet owner we have a TON of toys in our home. I generally try to keep them all in one small basket by our cats tower, however, the basket has been overflowing lately and a random assortment of odds and ends the cats collect have some how made their way into the toy basket.

Here is what I started with

 Our cats have a TON of toys, what can I say. 

So the first thing I did was remove the cardboard box from the back, the cats used to love playing/sleeping in there but they are no longer interested. I then used that box to toss some of the random items our cats had collected (they like to find and play with golf balls, Christmas ornaments, Easter eggs. any type of string, etc) All those items needed to be tossed or placed else where. The cats however, quickly became VERY interested in this box lol

I swear, they acted like they had no idea they had all these things lol Eventually they grew tired of the box and I was able to throw it away. I was then able to place all of their toys we were keeping back into their little toy basket and placed it underneath the cat tower. 

 

Atlas once again became interested and spent the next 10 minutes or so searching through the "toy box" looking for a toy to play with.

Overall it was a nice little project to tackle and one I had been meaning to do for awhile. I think the cats enjoyed watching me go through all their toys and found some toys they had forgot they had!

Now that is finally taken care of it was time to move on to another section of the house. This time I went back to my bathroom ( our 1/2 bath) Earlier on in the 21 day challenge I worked on getting my purses organized in this room as well as my makeup. Today we will be working on organizing my nail polish collection. I have slowly been building up my nail polish collection this year as I have started paitning my nails a good bit more. One issue I had with my nail polish was the fact that I had TOO many on the small shelf I was using. I also had a good bit of polishes that were quite old and the colors had separated or just weren't colors I would want to paint my nails. Those all needed to be thrown out. 

So before we do that, lets look at what I was working with.

The first thing I did was remove all the polishes off the shelf. Now I had a clear space to work with.

 I placed all my polishes on my sink counter and went through and grouped them together based on colors. This just enabled me to see what colors I had and how many of each. This helped me to toss any polishes I may have had others similar too or no longer liked.

...and here is the after.

 I placed the polishes back on the shelf by color. I kept my base coat and top coat together, blacks/grays/neutrals, reds/pinks/purples, orange/yellow/gold, and blues/greens. This is just the order that works for me. Feel free to organize your polishes how ever you like (I suggest either by colors, type, or you could even keep the most frequently used polishes together)  

Alright folks, there you have it! Two more projects out of the way and only two to go.

Happy Organizing! 

21 Day Organization Challenge: Day 16 & 17

Today is another two project type of posting. We will be working on two spots in the home that I bet many of us need help with in terms of organizing. I don't know about you but my table linens and extra curtains always seem to end up a jumbled mess. Currently I am storing them in a drawer in our china cabinet but it is just a mess of items thrown in and a HUGE pain in the butt to find anything. 

Here is what it currently looks like

The first thing I did was remove everything from the drawer. I put items that had ventured into this drawer back in the correct place. Now I had a blank space to work with. 

Somehow all of this was crammed into one drawer lol

Now it was time to put everything back. I placed items into large Ziploc bags and labeled what contents were inside. This will make it so much easier next time I am looking for an item.

So much better! I can actually see pretty quickly what all is stored in this drawer and keeping my items in the Ziploc bags will prevent my curtains and table runners from collecting any dust or debris. 

Moving on...in our house we LOVE candles and candle warmers. This means I always need a lighter and have a TON of wax melts around the house. The same goes for batteries, we seem to go through batteries like crazy! We often buy batteries in bulk from Sams Club but then never knew where to put them. We had this basket that we generally just toss random odds and ends into that seemed like it might do the job.

The first thing I did was take everything out of this basket. Honestly I was surprised and there were only a couple odds and ends that I had to deal with. Once those were thrown away and put away I could move on to using this basket for its new purpose. Again I use Ziploc bags and my label maker (can you tell I LOVE my label maker haha) and now our batteries and wax melts had a home.

So much better! I love that these items now have a good place to be stored and by putting them in this basket it conceals what is actually inside.

So there you have it, two more organizational projects tackled! Even if you don't have similar spaces in your home, the concept is the same. We all have curtains and table runners and batteries and I can bet that they are scattered throughout your home (it's OK ours were too) The important thing is to gather those items and organize them in whatever way works for you! 

Happy Organizing! 

21 Day Organization Challenge: Day 15

So, today we are going to be working on cleaning up all those computer files! I don't know about you but I have a horrible habit of just dumping files on my desktop and not doing anything with them for months. Organizing and keeping my computer files in check is something I struggle with. I find I often don't take the time to put files in the proper place and in the right folder and instead just drop them anywhere; on the desktop, in the download section, etc.

Here is what my desktop on my computer currently looks like 

(don't judge lol)

 It's bad I know lol I warned you, I really do have an awful habit of just putting stuff on my desktop and not touching it for a month. I really need to start labeling documents better and put them in the proper place from the beginning, this way I don't end up with 10 files named "untitled" and I have to go through all 10 just to find out what the heck they are...I can't be the only one with this problem lol

Ok, one more photo of the before. This is my download folder.

Ok, so time to actually work on getting my computer organized. I blame Youtube for the reason I have so many things on my desktop and download folder haha I make a new thumbnail every day and am often dumping the contents of my camera on my computer, this makes a ton of mess and a ton of files to sort through. It is my goal to not let my computer get this messy again. From here on out, I am making a promise to myself to always label folders correctly (the first time) and to take the time to put those items in the proper place. Not only will this save me time in the future, but it only takes 2 seconds to organize these files the first time around. I think I can spare 2 seconds of my time opposed to the hour it takes me later on when I have to re-sort through everything. 

Ok, so here is my after.

Boy does that make a difference. I actually have a desktop again haha I love that everything is now in its proper spot and I am determined to keep it up.

Do you often make a mess of your desktop and computer files? If so this challenge may be for you! Be sure to leave a link to your blog or Youtube channel so I can check out all of your hard work.

Happy Organizing!