31 Day Challenge: Dining Area

Step 9 seemed reasonably easy. We'd added a small cart to the corner of the dining area for extra storage, as well as a couple of cube style shelves that Dan pulled when he cleaned out the garage, which I used to hold canning equipment over the summer. However, seasons are changing and it's time to move some of the "summer" stuff to deeper storage and organize the "winter" stuff so that it's easily accessible. Pictures!

Before: from living room

Before: From bookshelf, toward living room

I just realized that I only took two "before" shots, but that ought to be good enough. You can see 90% of the issues in the first one, and the second covers the rest. 

Under the counter, next to the stools, nearly at the wall, is a reasonably sized cabinet and drawer that were completely blocked by the cube organizer which housed my canning gear. In the adjacent corner, a cart on wheels. So I swapped them, such that I could get at that cabinet by sliding the cart back. I also dragged the canning stuff back to the basement for winter. I do plan to can more, but it's not something I'll use on a daily (or even weekly) basis again until spring. I can shlep it upstairs as needed.

In the second shot, there is an old kitchen chair that my old roommate (Hi, Stacey) might remember from when we bought a kitchenette set at K-Mart in my first (and last) off-campus apartment. The rest of the set is long gone, but somehow this one chair never quite left and became a clutter magnet. So it's going to the garage for the moment.

After: From living room

After: From bookshelf, toward living room

I realized that it would make sense for at least some of Sam's art supplies to be available in easy reach of the kitchen table, since that's where he normally colors. I had a small rolling file cabinet under my desk in the office, so I brought that up and it fits just perfectly under that little shelf in the corner. It now houses lots of coloring books, construction paper, and crayons.

More kitchen-y decluttering, up next. Onward! #LWSLClutterFree

Video Friday: Duck Tales (with real ducks)

Because Sam happened to learn a parody version, I thought I would recommend this live-action re-imagining we found on YouTube. He watched it at least twice. Hopefully it will stick.

31 Day Challenge: Junk Drawer

Hey! I don't really have a junk drawer, which is a shame, since they seem to be right up my alley. Anyhow, as step 8 was cleaning out a junk drawer, I actually managed to accomplish this one on the day it was assigned.

As it turns out, I had more of a "junk spot" than a junk drawer. It's called "the top of my fridge." Now that Sam is crafty and sneaky and can push a chair over to get things off the top of the fridge, I need a new place to hide my sharpies. Without further ado, pictures:

Before: Lots of things on top of the fridge that don't necessarily belong there

After: Pen cup emptied, recipe box stowed away, and other tools/art supplies safely hidden in a latched drawer

I found a few small notepads up there which will be useful to have accessible. There were also some markers, crayons, and chalk that Sam can use at the kitchen table. There were also some larger art supplies (coloring books, sidewalk chalk, etc) that were integrated back into his main art supply storage area. 

At some point I will probably invest in narrow drawer dividers to separate the tools from the writing utensils. But for now, I'm happy to reclaim my coffee cup.

Onward! #LWSLClutterFree

31 Day Challenge: Toys

Going to start off today with an epiphany: For a person who declutters on at least a yearly basis, these tasks might be completed in a day. But for me, who hasn't done much in the course of the last three years, or even longer, each "day" is taking upwards of two days. And that's OK, as long as I keep at it and don't get too stuck on one task. I'll just keep printing off the checklists and adding them to my binder as they are posted, and check things off (and post here) as I finish them.

One big thing I managed was to finally get my label maker up and running. I am a little nervous about putting labels on places Sam can reach, since in the past he has destroyed every label I created. I'm not exaggerating: canisters in the kitchen, shelf labels in the office, it did not matter. All were peeled, all were ripped apart. But I am trying to follow the rules, and he needs to learn to leave the damn things alone, so we're trying it.

Anyhow. Task 7 was Toys. This is actually one of the most important, yet most daunting, tasks I'd been planning to do for ages now. We've had a lot of Sam's toys locked up in his closet for the past year or so. Now it's time to figure out what stays, and what goes. Pictures!

Before: From the door

Before: From the window (ugh...I was hanging onto those bins to use to organize the room, but still.)

Before: Shelving above door

Before: Closet from left door

Before: Closet from right door

Before: Closet from inside the right door, looking at the left

Before: Closet from inside the left door, looking right

After: From the door (He seriously couldn't wait. I'm not even sure what he's playing with here.)

After: From the window

After: Shelving above door

After: Closet from left door

After: Closet from right door

After: Closet from inside the right door, looking left

After: Closet from inside the left door, looking right

In all, I threw away three huge black bags of stuff that was broken, worn out, or otherwise unusable/unable to be donated. I had a few things to send to Grandma's and about 3 boxes of things to sell or donate. I decluttered the books down to two squares of the cube organizer and removed the small bookshelf entirely. The middle shelf above the door holds mostly things that are going to go, aside from the r/c truck. All of the baby toys and clothes were moved, sold, donated, or thrown out. I kept a small selection of keepsakes (first favorite book, first favorite toy, first pair of shoes, etc.) in the top left corner of the shelving. We still need to go through two more sweater boxes full of small plushes, on the top right above the door.

The shelves in the left side of the closet now hold different categories of toys: building toys, sensory toys, and on the floor, music toys and then role playing toys (pretend kitchen stuff, a doll, a toolkit, a fire helmet, etc.) The low plastic drawers contain puzzles and other small toys for imaginary play, like cars and action figures. The shelving in the far right of the closet still contains art materials, to be decluttered more thoroughly as I get a good idea of what we'll use. (I am sort of banking on there being a day where craft materials are decluttered.) Now that it's accessible, I plan to have Sam do more arts and crafts at home.

I got rid of a ton of redundant toys, and when the boys got back from the park, Sam jumped right in to play with his "new" toys. I like the idea of rotating a small selection of toys from week to week, so I will probably just pick one or two toys from each category and have those accessible. The closet will remain locked for the time being. Eventually we may create a playroom elsewhere and have Sam's bed actually in his room. What a concept. At that point, we'll have to move his dresser back in and have his closet available to him. I bought a shelf to put in, so that we could hang clothing in there (the closet has no rod), but never installed it. There are lots of pegs and hooks, though, so I'm making use of them to store backpacks in the meantime.

Anyhow. It was a pain, and took me all afternoon, but at least it's done. Onward! #LWSLClutterFree

31 Day Challenge: DVDs & Video Games

Oh, this one was hard to start. I was already feeling a bit burned out after purging books, but this was just, ugh. A few points:

Dan has already purged down his game collection over the years. It's already well organized and at this point, anything we still have is more or less "curated". Decisions about previous generation consoles may have to be made, but not at the moment.

DVDs and BluRays are a different beast. We have so many DVDs that we will never watch again, but it's a matter of sorting out the "keep" from the "toss," and agreeing on it among ourselves. Honestly, most of what we watch is streamed on Netflix, so dragging out individual discs to be placed in a device one by one seems cumbersome by comparison.

There is also the issue of Sam. In the past, he's messed with our DVDs so much that we had to set some aside in bins because he was literally ruining them: ripping the cases apart, destroying covers, scratching the discs beyond recognition, etc. That behavior seems to have slowed down, but we can't be sure that it's not just a lack of access thing. We moved our DVD player to the bedroom, since we can (and do) just play DVDs on the PS3 in the basement, and Sam has been messing with that, opening and closing the tray over and over. On the other hand, the DVD player in the minivan means that Sam is the one of us most likely to watch a physical copy of a DVD on any particular day. We keep a small stock of them (discs only) in the van.

So. Part of this feels futile and pointless. Even though it was step 6, I didn't even take "before" pictures until the 8th. Even though I knew I'd feel much better about it once it was done. Here we go:

Before: Most of it. Left 2.5 shelves are video games; the rest are DVDs and BluRays

Before: Random box of DVDs, possibly from a previous purge?

Before: Random tote of DVDs, stowed away at the height of Sam's carnage (not pictured: another bin the same size, full, that Dan found when I thought I was 90% finished)

Before: More video games, in the bedroom

Before: Even more video games, and a couple of DVDs, in the office

Since I knew how badly Sam had messed things up with the DVDs, I first went through and tried to see if all the discs were in their correct cases. This was especially important for the DVD movies and some of the television shows...he'd really made a huge mess of things. I had loose cases, loose inserts, and loose discs. In the end, I didn't find everything, since some had obviously been damaged badly enough to have been thrown away. There is a reason that the shelves Sam could reach by climbing on the couch were empty for a time, and the things put up high were the things we wanted to keep nice, for example, the newer BluRays and some of the anime.

Then I went to work on the bin and later the box. Most of what was in there were individual movies, and for the time, I didn't bother to sort by genre or alphabetize them. My categories were anime, animated TV, TV shows, and movies.  

Once all of what we had was visible, I went through and removed my "keepers" from the shelves (aside from the games and BluRays, which are staying put.) It only filled the banker's box. I was actually really close to finished with "my portion" of the purge by the end of the day on the 8th. Unfortunately, I needed Dan to weigh in on the rest of it.

I also needed to figure out how to handle the DS and 3DS games, which were in the bedroom and office. We had plans to purchase a taller, narrower bookshelf from IKEA to replace the bedroom bookshelf which was just too short to keep Sam out of. I decided that for the meantime, they would have to stay in the office, and since I'd already decluttered the books, I had upwards of two shelves to spare. [Last minute edit: I bought the bookcase this morning, but it's still not put together. Look for it in my "master bedroom" declutter post sometime in the next couple of weeks.]

Eventually I got Dan to take a look at what he wanted to keep. He was sure we still had more DVDs somewhere, and lo and behold, there was an entire bin that I didn't know about. So I sort of had to start over. When we finalized our "to keep" list, I organized what we had and labeled the shelves. It turned out to look like more on the shelves than there were before (for good reason; we actually have our movies out again!), but the stuff we got rid of filled an entire tote full plus that banker's box. So here's "after"!

After: tada!

I mostly just organized the four shelves to the right in the picture. Top row: BluRay Movies (2 shelves), BluRay Anime, and BluRay TV (with room to grow our collection.) Second row: DVD Anime (4 shelves). Third Row: DVD TV (4 shelves bleeding into the shelf of PS1 games to the left), Fourth and Bottom Rows: DVD Movies (6 shelves). I just noticed that I accidentally cut off the shelf to the far left, but it's just the same as it was. I may make labels for the game shelves at some point, too, but for now, they are self-explanatory.

Whew. Onward! #LWSLClutterFree

Video Friday: First Aid Kit, "Emmylou"

Taking a break from my 31 day challenge posts for today, and reviving Video Friday. This is just a song I happened to mention to my mom at lunch with Sam yesterday, so I thought I'd share it here. No idea what's supposed to be going on in the video, but I like the song!

31 Day Challenge: Books & Magazines

I actively dreaded this one. I was already behind by more than a day, so I didn't actually even start step 5 until halfway through the 6th (Monday). Once I was happy with the living room, I managed to bite the bullet, and I am SO GLAD I did. So, you know the drill. This time my before pictures are sort of all over the place, and I'll have some "during" pictures of the items to be purged, so bear with me.

Before: A few cookbooks lying on my "Sam can't reach this" shelf in the dining area

Before: Where's a great place for canning books? Wedged on top of canning supplies, obviously.

Before: Hey, look, kids' books in a kid's room! (A week ago half of them were all over my bedroom floor, so this is quite an improvement already.)

Before: Bedroom bookshelf has some books....and some random other stuff?

Before: Office bookshelf has books, and...food and empty canning jars and who knows what else?

Before: Another office bookshelf, with at least 50% books?

Before: A mostly-repurposed office bookshelf with canned goods and a bottom shelf full of...textbooks and yearbooks?

Before: Those two "small boxes" in the garage were also full of books, as was a third (not pictured). Had rarely been touched since we moved in three years ago, though I did dig cookbooks out of one of them.

During: The piles and piles of books that will LEAVE THIS HOUSE FOREVER

(Also: Epiphany: I will probably never speak a word of German ever again, let alone read any of my German language books ever again, and that's OK. My life hasn't taken me a direction in which I can use it, and I can stop feeling guilty about that.)

After: Cookbooks on the shelf Sam can't reach

After: Office bookshelf, top to bottom: Fiction/Novels, Comic Anthologies/Graphic Novels, Nonfiction/Memoir/Comedy, Textbooks from my current degree program (and a few for reference), and Classics/Classy

Dan still has one shelf full in the bedroom that needs to be gone through (mostly old fantasy novels), and I have a bunch of his game guides in the office that will probably get put up on top of this bookshelf in magazine files. I also need to let him pick through some of the nonfiction books that were his dad's before I get rid of them. (I kept the Hawking, under classics, right next to Shakespeare.) 

I also made the decision to hold off on organizing Sam's books until I do toys, since that is coming up very shortly (step 7).

One thing I'm not so thrilled about is that it's going to be a few days before I can truly get the books out, since I plan to try to get a little cash out of the nicer ones at Half Price Books. But I am determined to at least get them all loaded into the van within 24 hours. [Last minute edit Wednesday night: I came so close, but rolled an ankle carrying the 2nd to the last box out to the van, on our stupid rickety deck stairs. I'm OK, but decided to postpone any more book hauling until I could safely use the driveway.]

Whew. Onward! #LWSLClutterFree