I have mentioned on the podcast many times before that there is one blog that I read every single day... it is Andrea Dekker's. There is so much great material on her blog andreadekker.com. Andrea has four children under the age of six and she explains how she manages all their very different requirements, and her own, with a simple "be prepared" mantra. She also shares with us some great advice on selling your unwanted items on Craigslist, something she does often with success. How We Both Got Started Both Andrea and I started out with very different blogs. For me, I remember I was going to be this "guru" to help when your kids had food allergies and other things. But then I realized that dealing with that and dealing with everything my kids needed me to do was just too much! That is when in 2012, I launched Organize365.com. Though for Andrea, it was a little different. Andrea explains on the podcast that she just fell into doing what she does. After finishing college, starting work, and getting married, she realized she hated her job. Her father gave her some great advice when he told her to find out what she enjoyed doing and figure out a way to get paid for doing it. In doing that, she would be successful even if she didn't make a lot of money. So, a job she really disliked ended up being the springboard to starting her own organizing business, which was essentially her dream job. This was back in 2006. She didn't even have internet in her own house. But eventually she began to write her own blog, and she took some work as a virtual assistant. One of many things I love about Andrea's blog is her level of consistency. She would post every day at 8am and, just like reading a newspaper, I would sit down to read her blog every morning. I even copied this routine when I started blogging. My posts went up at 8am because Andrea's posts did! Andrea is good at routine. She takes the normal, everyday tasks and makes them more efficient and functional. She explains during the episode that she doesn't have creative, cool things to share. She just focuses on functionality and frugal solutions. If It Doesn't Work, Change It I was delighted that Andrea was willing to share a couple tips for my Organize 365 listeners. And I can certainly relate to the first tip about constantly evaluating what works and what doesn't work. Take the kids' toys for example... if the toys no longer fit in their space, then something has to go. Don't continue to just accumulate without purging as you go along. I am a self-confessed consumer, but the kids' toys change as they get older. I find that spreading them out into different rooms, or making them responsible for their own toys in their own space, makes it less overwhelming for you to clean them up again afterwards. Making the house work for you and your children is key. Andrea makes her house work for her. It’s almost like a preschool room... the kids can help themselves. I remember when my children were born, I kept the socks upstairs because that's where you keep socks, right? But we always put socks and shoes on in the family room. So when I moved the socks downstairs, it was like the heavens opened and the angels started singing because I didn't have to go searching for socks anymore. Make your house function for you and your family. It works until it doesn't work. And then when it doesn't work, change it. How To Sell On Craigslist The thing about purging and reorganizing is that you end up with a bunch of stuff that I tell you to load in the car, take to Goodwill, drop it all off, and move on. This is where Andrea gives us some great advice as she is so good at selling on Craigslist. On her website, she has some great articles on this topic where she goes into great detail about how to write the advertisement and what things are most important when selling via Craigslist. Click here to see her "Craigslist 101" posts. And she even has one on how she sold her house on Craigslist – click