Spring Cleaning

We live in a 900 sq foot apartment and we have a lot of junk. This equals problem. All winter I've been feeling like our house has been so cluttered, even when we would clean up it still felt like it was closing in on us. I realized a while ago that I have my craft stuff located in about 4 different places. We have a similar problem with other things, like bedding. It drives me nuts! I just want everything in the same category to be located in the same place, and I want to quit storing things I don't use and will never need. Especially now that we have another baby on the way which inevitably leads to more stuff (especially since she's a girl, so a whole new wardrobe). Now that Aaron is done with school for the summer, I convinced him that a great project would be to build a storage shelf in Ivan's bedroom closet.

Ivan's bedroom closet is the worst mess in our house, it's pretty much crammed full of stuff, but has no real order to it, and any time you need to get one thing out of there, you have to empty the whole closet and then repack it again. My idea was that if we had a shelf in there, worst case scenario, it would make the problem smaller by eliminating the need to unpack the whole closet down to just unpacking one shelf.

The new shelf about to go in the almost empty closet

All the junk that used to be in the closet taking over Ivan's room

I spent pretty much a whole day just sorting through all the things that used to be in Ivan's closet. My discovery: we were storing a lot of stuff we didn't need (surprise, surprise) and we were storing a lot of empty cardboard boxes that were not collapsed (dumb!). Once I started putting things back into the closet, I decided to move all the bedding from the hall closet into this closet so it would all be in once place. (It's been in two places because the hall closet had all the small things like pillowcases and sheets, but wasn't big enough to store blankets and quilts which we kept in Ivan's closet.) I still had a ton of room, so I put all things baby onto the shelf as well...the Rubbermaid boxes of various sizes of little boy clothes, the jumpy seat, the bouncy chair, the breast pump, port-a-crib, hiking backpack, Bjorn, etc. And all the clothes we've purchased or been given for Adelia so far. (Those won't stay in the closet long, but I have to find a third dresser first, yikes!)

Doing that pretty much freed up Lincoln's entire closet. His is completely empty now except for the Radio Flyer. Cool! I don't anticipate it will stay that way too long though, since we will be putting the boys in the same room sooner or later. But for now it's really nice just to have an empty space in our house.

I still have a long ways to go with my spring cleaning. I still need to organize my sewing cabinet and figure out a good location for my craft stuff (hmm...the hall closet is free...) and go through mine and Aaron's bedroom closet...and on and on. But we are a step closer in the right direction and I have a huge pile with Deseret Industries' name on it. :)