WFMW--beeping key finder

I'm almost embarrassed to admit this one. Our house is not big. We're lucky; it's very comfortable, but it's a split level, so our downstairs area with kitchen/living room/dining room/family room is a mostly open plan where you really can see almost everything from everywhere. So you would think that finding things wouldn't be an issue.

But, there you would be wrong. To my long-suffering husband's chagrin, I am messy. In a big way. I have other positive traits but even our two year old is better at putting things away than I am. I am working on it. But for us, a great invention was the button on the base of the phone that makes the receiver beep so you can find it. (They kindly call it the "intercom" not the "so you can find the thing in the mess your wife made" button.) Wouldn't it be great, I thought, if there was something like that for all the other stuff I'm losing?

There is. And my lovely long-suffering husband found it. Target had them last year; something similar online is here but I cannot vouch for it; it's just something similar but not the same as ours.

My husband found me a remote locator. We stuck a receiver on four different easily misplaced items. There is a sacrosanct spot in our kitchen drawer for the remote. It never moves from there, ever. It has four buttons; each button is labeled. (Thanks again to my husband.) The red one is for the TV remote. The blue one is for the DVD remote. The yellow one is for my car keys; the green is for his car keys. So if we are in a jam, we just wander around, pushing the right-colored button until we hear the beeping and voila! There is the missing object.

Yes, keeping a neat house would be easier. But in the meantime, this works for me! Go see Shannon's blog, Rocks in my Dryer, for more good ideas!