Hanging Two Mirrors & Using Them As Dry Erase Boards

In our last office we found that hanging a mirror helped keep us organized. Not simply because we noticed if we had something on our face, but also because we could write on it with a dry erase marker to keep track of our to do list (and could even use it to write a welcome message to our guests since that room slept our friends and family as well).

When we moved I missed that little organizational corner, so I began taping a comically small piece of paper on the wall with a list of things to do. And then it grew into two lists, one on each side of the large doorway. The left one was entitled: “Posts To Write” and the right one was “Projects To Do.” Since we have a giant 300+ list of things we want to do in this house (see simply a fraction of them here), selecting the next ten-ish tasks that we want to tackle helps keep us focused (and enables us to hone in on which things should be prioritized and which supplies we will have to pick up). Plus after we do projects it is surprisingly straightforward to forget to journal about them since we are so excited to bounce along to the next one. So keeping track of what we have done that is waiting to be written about keeps us sane (and keeps our lag time from “did it in real life” to “blogged about it” as short as possible).

But for some reason not having an erasable surface was seriously hurting our update frequency. See how “limb up the magnolia” is on the list when we I already did that weeks ago? Not good.

So I padded back into the playroom (which is full of baskets, bedding, and a ton of frames and mirrors – seriously it is where stuff goes to die in our house) and grabbed two semi-similarly-sized mirrors and asked John to hang them up. Yes, I outsourced the labor on that one (my go-to excuse: I gotta nurse the baby – it is the one thing John cannot do so it works like a charm). And it left me free to “supervise” from the big green sofa while John got his hang on.

The result? Two dry erase boards for keeping track of “Projects To Do” and “Posts To Write.” They are not ideal, but they look a lot better than those rarely updated little notebook pages that were taped to the wall (look no dining chairs, I pushed them all against the wall for vacuuming under the table and never pushed them back – go Team Lazy):

That picture above is what they would look like if we ever did everything on our to do list. Remarkable.

But here is what they in fact look like with all of the projects and posts on our list:

Oh and that is the blue dry erase marker on the top of the mirror on the right (since it is deep sufficient to store it there). Perhaps someday we will hunt down more of a mirror twin for one or the other (for a more balanced look) but for now we are simply glad to work with what we have. The most essential thing is that we can now take pleasure in crossing things off of our list again. That is a universally lively activity right? Now picture doing it with a dry erase marker that glides like butter over whatever you simply accomplished. There is nothing better I tell ya.