Home Management Binder: Meal Planning {Free Printables}

I'm back again with another awesome addition to my in progress Home Management Binder. If you missed the first post click to read Section 1: Calendar & Contacts. Like the first section, all the printables listed below will be FREE! They are free mostly because I love free things and because I would love for you to be able to follow along if you wanted too. I've decided to make this a weekly series until it is complete, so next Monday I will post Section 3.

This section was either going to be about cleaning or meal planning. Since I personally live in my kitchen I wanted to make sure I made the kitchen printables ASAP. The cleaning can wait :)

The first form I created was a weekly menu/grocery shopping list. I started using this form last week and it made it so much easier last week and this week going grocery shopping. The menu planner on the left side is for Sunday - Saturday. The grocery shopping list is broken down by categories as I walk through my grocery story.

Menu Sunday

OK, I'm planning on bringing back Menu Monday  Sunday. Yeah, I'm changing it a day since I shop every Sunday and I meal plan for Sunday-Saturday. It doesn't sound as good as Menu Monday did but it will do. Posting our meal plans make me accountable to actually keep to a plan. The past few weeks I didn't take the time to make a plan and I didn't even make time to go grocery shopping every week. You know what happened? We ate out for lunch everyday. Everyday at work around 3:30 my husband would text me asking what's for dinner. Everyday I responded, "Since I'm lazy and didn't go grocery shopping we don't have anything at home". I either stopped by the grocery store on the way home to pick up enough for one meal or we ordered in. Yeah, that's a lot of moolah. That's blowing our budget for our bellies.  

As I mentioned here we are trying to get our lives organized again, this means making a budget and sticking to it. I'm still trying to keep us on our weekly budget that I first mentioned here but $60 a week may not be realistic anymore. Once we go through our finances I will have a better idea of what we've been spending a month, it might be easier to track it monthly. I'll let ya know if we decide to increase it. This week I went to Kroger, and spent $54.56, and I went to Aldi, and spent $24.95. I only went $19.51 over my self imposed budget, but it still isn't to bad considering it should include breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

This is what we have planned at Twenty63 this week:

DIY Burlap Wreath

You may be visiting today to check out the next section in my Home Management Binder as promised here, but I'm still working on my checklist and forms. I plan on having it up and ready on Monday because I need a few more days to tweak my list.  

This week I decided to stop pinning wonderful inspiration on my down time and actually do a project that I've been wanting to complete since the beginning of the summer. Yeah, I'm slow.

I've been loving all of the burlap wreath's I've seen through the blog world and Pinterest. As soon as I laid eyes on a burlap wreath months back I knew I wanted one. Let's look at some of my inspiration:

Home Management Binder: Calendar & Contacts {Free Printables}

As I mentioned here we working on getting our house in shape, in more ways than one. For me, the most important item to cross of the list first is a new paper system. Over the past few months I have pinned a million different Home Management Binder ideas to reference at a later date. I love the idea of having everything at my fingertips, especially things I use daily/monthly. I handle all of the finances in our household and I am getting the Mr more involved so if anything every happened to me he wouldn't be a deer in headlights trying to figure out where to send our mortgage payment.

If you haven't created a Home Management Binder, or if you have one that needs a little updating, I would suggest just typing 'Home Management Binder' in Google and a ton of results will pop up. Even though I found a lot of great printable worksheets, some free some not, I decided to create my own for several reasons. (1) We don't have kids - it's just us and the dogs - so a lot of the printable forms I found listed things we didn't need like school information, chores, etc and (2) I am OCD and like my forms to match. I've made all of the forms I created available to you lovely readers (if anyone is out there!) for FREE! I love that word :)

To get started I shopped my house to get the supplies I needed:

Changing How We Live

A few weeks ago I hit a wall. I was tired and exhausted of being tired and exhausted. I was over paying bills, grocery shopping, cleaning, organizing, going to work, walking the dogs, folding clothes, washing dishes, etc. Basically, I was tired of our day to day grind and I needed a mental vacation. So, I did just that - except I still went to work. I took some time to step back and look at our over all picture and I realized one huge thing. The fault was me and me alone. I put to much pressure on myself. I don't let my husband help enough, even though he offers. For some reason I think I need to do it all. Correction, I'm slightly OCD controlling and he doesn't do things the way I do them so I automatically think it's wrong. So, basically I was making myself exhausted for no reason.

After a week of my mental vacation, I realized I'm so stressed and exhausted because we have become completely unorganized this year. We have become lazy. After several long conversations with the Mr. we've decided the make the following changes:

Who me?!?

The past few weeks I have been stuck in a rut. You could have called me a debbie downer. An emotional wreck. Ok, maybe that is taking it a little to far - but I sure enough wasn't myself. So, I haven't posted in a while because my mood was taking me for a loop.

But, last Friday, while stalking checking in on one of my favorite blogs, I saw where Nicky from Meaningful Nest nominated my little ol' blog with the Versatile Blogger Award. Say what??? Yep, you read that correctly. Shocked right? Yeah, I know - me too!

Under the Sink

I know I promised another small kitchen project in this post but when I wrote it I had a total brain fart and forgot I wouldn't be posting on July 4th. I hope everyone had a festive holiday spending time with loved ones. I will post all about our adventures for the 4th in the coming days.

Now, back to the kitchen. I will have to give a disclaimer, this blog is about to get real. Like real dirty. I was embarrassed at myself for not noticing how nasty under the sink was until I decided to attach it. When the hubs and I bought this house and moved in, under the kitchen sink was an area where I just threw cleaning supplies and happily said "I will clean that out later"...well little did I know that "later" would be almost 2 years after our move in date. So, lets just get to it.

This is what I started with, a complete and utter mess!

Freezing My Bins Off

Obviously, this blog title has nothing to do with the weather. Here in Central Indiana it's been hot and humid, we have seen many 100+ days this past week. I really don't want to complain about the heat, honestly, the heat doesn't bother me. But, when the humidity is so high that I feel like I have asthma when I am walking to the parking garage after work, when I don't have asthma, we have a problem. That problem could be the extra love  pounds around my mid section, but lets just blame it on the humidity!

This weekend I spent sometime in the container store {L.O.V.E that place!}. They are currently having there Happy Organized Home Sale and I had my eye on a few products. So I loaded up the husband and we spent an hour plus walking up and down every aisle. I was proud of myself, I walked out with only the things on my list and within my self set budget. I swear if I didn't have a budget I would buy the entire store.

Way before I even thought about starting a blog, I was {and still am} a daily reader of Jen at IHeart Organizing, if you have never been to her blog you have to stop by - she performs magic for real! Anywho, she had a brilliant idea to use these Multi-Purpose Bins from the container store in her freezer. I loved it and knew one day it would probably come in handy.