Emily wants to redo the upstairs in our house and that means a major clean up! We have way to much stuff and it has to go. For years we kept any and everything we thought one of the foster children might need and a lot of it is still here. So yesterday we started and so much of the things we had kept just needed to go in the trash! Emily is at church working on a creative movement today, so we have not gotten as much done but we are getting there slowly. Three of the bedrooms are going to be hers to use and one is going to be my new sewing room. She claimed the upstairs bathroom too and is changing the color and got a new rug and shower curtains for it. She has cleaned and cleaned to get it the way she wants it. I think it is now off limits to her brothers and nephews when they visit! She is thrilled because her daddy said the dogs can go upstairs if she wants them too. We have never let them go upstairs, but since Emily will make sure they are not getting into somebody's candy stash or something, we are going to try it. The garbage truck driver probably thought we were moving when he saw all the trash this morning. Now Freddy has gone to take a load of big stuff to the dump. Hopefully we will get a load to Goodwill later today. We have a twin waterbed to take and I think a set of bunk beds too. There are bags of toys and clothes and just stuff! And that is not the end of it yet. Maybe we can get most of the big stuff out today if Emily gets home from creative movement practice at church! Wish us luck!!!
I love a good clean out! I'm trying to do one before our baby comes. Though at the moment I'll settle for just stashing what we aren't currently using/don't have a home for in the basement so our living space can be as uncluttered as possible.
Sounds exciting! We really should have a big clean out of this house, but it's so hard to get rid of things when you "might" need it...sigh.
We got some work done today but not as much as I had hoped. The creative movement team ending up going swimming at my sister's house and I didn't have the heart to tell Emily not to go. She had a good time and we should have time to work tomorrow before the Youth Group leaves at 1PM for a trip to the New River. MAYBE we can get a lot done on Thursday! It is looking good though. Now I keep thinking about working on the downstairs too! Freddy is going to go hide somewhere!
I am doing a clean up around my place. I have junk that I have not used in years and it needs to go. I need the space for other things and the Junk room is needed. I have to be brutal with myself and get things gone. ETA, one thing that helps me these days is the fact that the convenience center had a swap shed and I can take stuff there. It is good to see others taking itbefore I can even get my recycles sorted. I guess people need the stuff and I have no guilt about getting rid of it.
It takes us a long time to go through stuff because we have to sort and then talk about where stuff came from and do you remember when...lol. It has been fun though. Now if I could just get Freddy up and started loading the trailer to take a load to Goodwill. Anybody need a twin size waterbed? Oh well, it wouldn't fit into an envelope anyway!
We did this as we were getting ready to sell our home a couple years ago.... therapeutic for me (though the garbage collector HATED me I'm sure). Though we haven't accumulated a lot of 'junk' since then, I find myself going through the house again for the past several days and thinning it out again (my youngest son's bedroom especially..... finding clothing that hasn't fit him for awhile yet he still had it).
Brenda don't even get me started on clothes! The only good thing is that I have found some of one of my daughter's old clothes that I can wear now. She didn't want them and just dumped them in a spare room upstairs. Now I have two nice skirts and a pair of black dress pants that look great. Too bad I can't wear her shoes! Goodwill is getting most of the clothes and a few things can go to church for the clothing closet.
The good thing about moving often is that you don't accumulate *as much* junk! I've been doing a lot of cleaning out in the past couple of weeks. If you are on Facebook, find an area yard sale group. Craigslist is a good option if it's active in your area, but people are on FB all day long! I've sold quite a few clothes this week-not for a lot of money, but enough to buy dd9 a pair of shoes she needed!
It is crazy what all was packed away in boxes and hidden under other stuff. Right here beside me is a practically new pair of roller skates in a size 5. My daughters have not worn a size 5 in years! I don't think they ever even wore these! Makes me crazy! And I don't even know how many Barbies we have over here in a box. 25 or 30 I bet! I told Emily I am keeping the Build a Bears and the Fisher Price Loving Family stuff for my future grandgirls. I only have grandboys right now. She thinks that is funny but it could happen! She wants me to get rid of the Barbie stuff. I keep puting things in the Goodwill box and then taking it out while she rolls her eyes at me.
I love a good deep cleaning of a home! You have just inspired me to get my butt in motion and clean my house!!
My house looks like a tornado hit! It seems like the more we do the more we find and want to do. Right now there are freshly ironed clothes hanging all over the place to take to our favorite consignment shop in the morning plus piles of toys and other items to take to the playroom at our church for our afterschool program. The box of Barbies is still around somewhere waiting for me to make up my mind about what to do with all of them. Tomorrow Emily and I plan to drag out all the twin size beds that nobody uses and see if we can give them away. She may decide to keep one for when my oldest grandson spends the night. If all goes well I may start moving my sewing room upstairs tomorrow or Saturday. I am excited about that. The room it is in now is very tiny and in the back of the house where I can't really see anything that is going on. It is getting better but we still have alot of junk to sort and get rid of. I've never seen so many VHS tapes! We don't even have anything to play them on. I think we still have a player at church in the children's dept. I need to check and see and they could use them for afterschool. Great. Something else to do tomorrow.
We started this major clean out/clean up 10 days ago and we are still at it. We don't clean on Sundays and we took a day off to go to Tweetsie Railroad with Emily and our son Bill, but other than those days we have worked at least part of each day on sorting things, washing things to take to Goodwill and throwing away anything else we don't want to keep. The four bedrooms upstairs are almost the way we want them and the bathroom upstairs is done too. I made on upstairs bedroom my new sewing room and I try to work a little in there when I can. I am washing, ironing and sorting all my material and it is so much fun to look at it and remember why and when I bought it. All my quilt books and magazines are on an old pie safe I have in that room and I plan on sorting and organizing all of them later on. (I have almost every issue of QUILTMAKER MAGAZINE ever published.) Four of my sewing machines are in there and I am moving the serger as soon as I can find a place to put it! I have one more old machine I may put up there for sewing heavy fabic. We have taken loads to the dump and still have junk to go through, but we are getting there! Once the upstairs is finished I want to go through the downstairs and see what we can get rid of. I really am finding peace in having less. I never thought I would get Freddy on board with all this but he is helping and seems to enjoy it. He is a bigger book junkie than I am so I don't even mention getting rid of any books but I don't mind at all! Emily is loving the changes in our home. She helped me wash and dress all the old Barbies and we gave them to my cousin's two little girls last Sunday. They were thrilled! I am keeping some things for my future grandgirls but not too much. Well, back at it! Wish me luck!
