One of the main goals of the summer is to ‘get this house in order,’ which breaks down into three major categories:
– catch up on the outdoor clean-up and weeding and planting that I am woefully behind on (more this year than any year before, alas — I haven’t laid down mulch yet, for example)
– clean up and organize the house’s major sections (I’ve been working steadily on this for a few months, and I’m mostly down to the Serendib area in the basement (pictured below, though I tried to spare you the chaos part of the pictures) and 3/4 of the children’s playroom up on the third floor. (There are lots of smaller sub-projects to tackle in the fall, like cleaning out the medicine cabinets and dealing with my own paper files, but mostly, I’m trying to get things just “put away”.)
– deal with my e-mail, which is a disaster (Stephanie is coming over at 10 to work with me on it today; we’re hoping to start putting a system in place to help me stay on top of it.)
Most of this is just putting in the time, but every once in a while, I realize that an organizational tool will help. I was getting annoyed trying to find specific essential oils for soap-making, because I had them in a bin, and had to look through most of them to find the one I wanted. They also tended to fall over every time I moved the bin, making it even harder to find them. And then I realized oh, this is probably a solved problem, so I googled ‘essential oil organizer,’ and found many pre-made options.
This is the one I went with, and while it’s not perfect — I’d probably do more larger compartments and fewer smaller ones for what I have on hand — it’s a definite improvement! They are ALPHABETIZED. Gods, I love alphabetization.
As a bonus, their little list of pre-made stickers is making me think, oh, it’d be fun to try to compose a soap or body butter with that scent…thinking ahead to the fall treat boxes. 
Like they have three stickers pre-printed for melaleuca, which makes me think it’s something I ought to investigate…
