It's Finally Clean!

It's clean, It's clean! It's finally clean!

The bedroom that I share with my husband has been clean a few times over the 11 years that we have been in this house. But that's it.  We have a teeny, tiny, itsy bitsy, wee little dwelling place. With seven children. And a dog.

The parents' room, sadly, became the dumping grounds.
"Mom! Where do I put this?"
"Just put it in my room."
This conversation has been had hundreds of times. Too often, something comes into the house that doesn't yet have a place of it's own. Often it's something that needs to be safe from little hands, or stored until further use. When there are three children in one bedroom and four in the next, you can be sure that every corner is used carefully.

Not in my room. Packed, perhaps, but not carefully.

Here's how it happened: Two of the boys are growing, therefore, the clothes they were are also become increasingly longer. The clothing was not longer fitting in the closet the way it was set up. I needed a new solution, but still had to fit clothing for four  boys in the same amount of space.

My solution was to pull out an old trick that my Step-Mom taught me. Re-purpose the furniture.
We don't us bureaus because they take up precious space. Instead, in my closet, hubby and I each had a tower of wire baskets bought at Ikea. I looked through them and found that Most of my clothes hang, so my baskets were filled with all sorts of  'stuff'.

You guessed it, the boys ended up with my set of baskets, and their jeans now reside comfortably.
As a result of removing my baskets, I changed the configuration of our closet, got rid of a bunch of stuff that turned out to be junk. Since I was cleaning up the closet, I figured I would clean up the other corners piled with stored items.

It turns out that much of what was stored now had a 'place', we had just forgotten that we had the items. I found some things that I had put away for Christmas and birthdays, so it looks like I get to trim that budget this year! I also found things that I wasn't entirely sure I had ever seen come into the house.

By the end of the day, I had removed six bags of stuff from my room. I didn't know I could fit that much stuff in there!

It's actually nice to get out of bed in the morning and not look at all that stuff!