Organization ala Laundry Room

Many of you followed my drama surrounding my dryer fiasco and the subsequent purchase of a new one. I’m happy to report that my new washer and dryer have settled in nicely and stepped up to the plate as far as their daily cleaning duties go.

Not long after getting the new ones, I became inspired to give the whole laundry room a little bit of a makeover. Nothing crazy – I’m not painting in there (yet) but I figured I could at least clean it up and organize a bit. Enter Thirty-One (of course). I decided that our Square Utility Totes would be perfection for organizing stuff on the shelving above the washer and dryer. And boy was I right. LOVE how it came out.

There are a couple more, one for “Kid’s Stuff” and one for “Storage” but you get the idea. I adore things that are adorable and functional!

My daughter’s room

I promised pictures, so here you go! She LOVES the new color, and promises me she will actually keep it clean (which I doubt) but at least if nothing else I had a chance to get rid of a ton of her misc. junk that she’s had in there. This is honestly the cleanest her room has been in YEARS!

Started on my son’s room today, and hopefully will finish it over the weekend!

How I spent my day

We’ve decided to repaint the kid’s rooms. In order to do this, we really had to clean out a BUNCH of stuff from both rooms. Being as I actually wanted this to happen today, I decided I HAD to help them. This was literally all day long. I lost count of how many trash bags we filled, but at the moment they are all still piled up in the loft in front of the pool table.

The accumulated clutter that used to be in the kid’s rooms. Honestly it’s hard to believe this all fit in their rooms before, because quite frankly it sure doesn’t seem like their rooms are lacking for stuff without all this in there.

Painting begins tomorrow. Woohoo!

Cleaning

That’s pretty much the word of the day here today. I decided to tackle the silverware drawer. Well, we actually kind of have two. One silverware and accessories, and one for rarely used accessories. Luckily I was able to throw out a LOT of stuff. Amazing how many duplicate items we had. And duplicate of stuff that we hardly ever use anyway. For example, the following duplicate items were tossed:

• 2 egg white separators
• an apple corer (why would I need more than one of these??)
• about 10 knives from a mediocre knife set we had like 10 years ago
• 4 beer bottle openers
• 3 grapefruit peelers
• 3 spatulas (and I still kept 3 more!)
• 4 ladles (and again, still no shortage on those I kept)

Now I’m off to clean the bathrooms, a chore that I never enjoy. How old do my kids have to be before I implement a slave labor program with them??

Any Day Now…

Any day now I will pull the weeds that have sprouted up around the pool.
Any day now I will clean out the kitchen cabinets and get rid of the 6.2 billion cups, glasses, mugs and containers that we haven’t used since we moved in 9 years ago.
Any day now I will go through the papers in my “to do” pile.
Any day now I will update the kid’s birthday books with the last two years of birthday pictures.
Any day now I will follow through on my threat to take away half my daughter’s toys if she doesn’t clean her room (gee, wonder where she gets that).
Any day now I will actually organize the pantry so we can perhaps actually eat some of this insane volume of food we have.

What’s on your Any Day Now list?

project 365 - day thirteen

This disaster is my daughter's room. I don't know if it is because I redid my scrapbook room and it looks so awesome, but I've been a freak for the re-do the past few days. Organizing, cleaning, throwing away...I just can't stop!! It's possible that I've met my match with dd's room, though. Man, this child of mine is a packrat like none I've ever seen. Old stuff, broken stuff, empty stuff...she can't part with any of it. Luckily I have banned her from her room while I work on it, so plenty is finding it's way into the trash. This photo shows only an itty corner of the room, but unfortunately pretty much the rest of the room is just as bad. God help me. And here's how crazy I am - I'm doing my son's room once dd's is done. Fun weekend for me, right?