Hello everyone! While my wife has been sharing her usual updates about feminine products, nail polish, and other things she loves (just kidding—love you, honey), I’ve been quietly tackling tech organization. Today we promised to focus on paper and digital organization—specifically streamlining the blog’s project gallery—so I’m here to share what we changed. With so much organizing happening around the house this week, it was only a matter of time before the blog got a makeover. The part of the site that felt most out of control was our Projects page under the blog header.
The Projects page is where we’ve tried to organize all of our project posts into categories. In the early days, a simple linked description for each project worked fine. But as our project list grew, the page became a long, text-heavy list that was hard to scan. At one point we counted over 750 links on that page (with some duplicates for projects that fit multiple categories). Since it hadn’t been updated since December, we guessed the total could reach 1,000 after a few more months of posts.
Over the last couple of weeks we focused on an overhaul with two main goals: 1) reduce clutter, and 2) make browsing easier. Think of the Projects area like a bookstore—rather than hunting for a single title with the search bar, you can casually browse a section to see what catches your eye. We also refreshed the layout so it feels much cleaner and more inviting.
Paring down was straightforward: we reduced 26 categories to 16 by consolidating duplicates while keeping every project intact. For browse-ability, we added a visual element—project covers—so each project now features a thumbnail image. This makes scanning categories faster and more pleasant, and helps you zero in on what you might like to try.
We’d wanted to add thumbnails and give each category its own page for a while, inspired by galleries that show glossy photos. Creating those thumbnails turned out to be labor-intensive: we hand-coded over 600 thumbnails to match our template and category structure. It was a lot of hours, but the result is worth it—no more endless lines of links, just clear visuals that make discovery easier.
Images help make scrolling much easier on the eyes and let you spot the style of project you want more quickly. And let’s be honest—pictures are simply nicer to look at.
Now there’s one main projects page that shows a few thumbnails for each category so you can get a feel for the content. Click “more” to open a full page for any of the 16 categories. The categories are:
- Most Popular
- Painting
- Decorating
- Furniture Upgrades
- Crafting & Art
- Home Improvement
- Outside
- Cleaning, Organizing & Eco
- Lovey-Dovey
- Money Saving
- Kids & Pets
- Holiday
- Videos
- Projects By Month
We’ll update these categories every few weeks with our newest projects so they stay current. The ordering within category pages is intentionally informal: we highlighted favorites and popular posts near the top, grouped related projects together when it made sense (like kitchen and bathroom remodels), and otherwise embraced a bit of randomness—like wandering through a bookstore and picking something that looks interesting.
We hope you like the refresh. With the Projects page tidied up, I can move on to another big organization task on my list: the basement. I’ll share more about that soon. In the meantime, what paper or digital organizing projects have you tackled lately? Any tips to share, or are you planning to tackle something tonight?
If you were hoping for a traditional organizing post focused on purging and sorting, check out our newly organized Cleaning & Organizing page, where you’ll find many posts on that topic.