Kid Room Cleanout

Like so many others, I am in an organizing mood as of late. Possibly it's due to the new year and the need for things to feel refreshed. More likely it's due to knowing that we plan to sell our home within a couple months and I'm trying to get our spaces ready. (Alternate reading: I'm trying to declutter on a magnanimous level!) 

Aaron & I semi-tackled the pantry last weekend and I'll share pictures of that when I get around to doing more but it wasn't a huge change and I don't have "before" pictures so I'll have to explain how it looked previously. 

Today rather, I'm focusing on how we decluttered our kids' rooms. This was a multi-step process for sure and my hope is that it remains clean at least until pictures are taken for the house sale. 

I don't really have "before" pictures of these spaces because I didn't like to look at the constant clutter, and I struggled to think of how to get toys off the floor.  The boys have lots of buckets and bins in their room that we were encouraging them to put their toys in, but toys were just haphazardly placed in them which meant they might only be half full and not fit on the shelf properly which led to toys randomly being placed all over the floor. Also, everything was all mixed up so if they were searching for something particular, all the toys would end up on the floor and most likely would not be put away. 

In Walmart this past week, I bought two canvas bins (one for boys' room and one for Avery's room). These bins kind of spurred along a new inspiration to organize. 

In Avery's room after Christmas, we bought a red storage bin and put her stuffed animals and baby dolls in it. She has a vintage doll bunkbed and we use it for shelves. She has a few baskets on it (one for her favorite doll's clothes, one for her most played with Barbies, and one for dress up clothes). She also has a couple small plastic bins with lids and I moved the rest of her Barbies into one of these bins, then I put Barbie accessories in the smaller bin. These are stacked in her dress-up basket where she can easily access them and easily put them away.  She used to have her big Barbie toys (camper, grocery store) in a striped canvas bin on her floor but it took up so much space. I eventually figured out if I really moved all of her stuffed animals to the red storage bin, I could free up the lower level of the doll bunk bed to put the striped pink bin.  I put her Paw Patrol characters into a clear zipper bag and placed it under the bunk bed. Next to the pink bin, I placed the new canvas bin from Walmart & we're storing her horses and unicorns in that bin. The only things on her floor now are the Polly Pocket unicorn, the Paw Patrol tower & a trash bin. 

It seems so much more spacious! For the moment I'm keeping her gigantic unicorn bean bag on her bed since it takes up so much space. This might move back to grandma's house when we list our home. 

In the boys room, we have done ALOT of work over the past couple weeks. The boys spent New Year's morning sorting through toys & really deciding which ones they wanted to keep. We've made one run to the donation center and still have one or two loads to do over the new few weeks (the donation center was overwhelmed with stuff on New Year's day so we're giving them time to process what they've received before we inundate them with more things). 

Noah has collected garbage trucks and police cars for four years or more and amassed quite a collection. We brought out a big plastic bin to the living room last weekend and lined up every garbage truck, police car, firetruck, and bus and told him he could keep whatever fit into the bin (with the lid still being able to close). He did VERY well and this eliminated about a third to half of his collection. 

Yesterday, we hauled out every bin and bucket of toys into the living room and sorted them according to type ("emergency vehicles," "Legos," "Utility Vehicles," "Random Toys" etc.). Then we selected bins to match the amount of toys in each category (so "emergency vehicles" like hot wheels size police cars and police stations etc. were placed into an appropriate sized bin). These bins were then placed accordingly on their shelf. Today we reminded them that if they play with a toy, they should put it back in its bin before moving on to something else. 

Tonight, the boys & I spent some time in their room cleaning out from under the bunk bed. We eliminated half a garbage bag full of trash! Little torn up slips of paper, broken toy pieces, etc. are now no longer hiding in the room. Taking pictures of the clean area & loads of floor space to prove to ourselves that this can be done was a great boost to our morale!

I feel WAY more at ease about the potential to photograph these rooms for a listing and I hope that playtime is more enjoyable for my kids since they can easily find the things they enjoy. 

Until Next Time,

Much Love, Reba

Avery's Painted Room

A couple of weeks ago, my mother-in-law and I painted Avery's room over the course of a morning.  I had chosen the color "Arid Plains" by Behr Premium Marquee and we only had to do one coat!  The brand is more expensive initially, but it comes out cheaper in the end instead of buying other brands and having to buy extra gallons when the first can doesn't provide enough coverage.  After seeing how well this brand did in the boys' room, the hall bathroom, and Avery's room, I doubt I'll buy any other brand in the future.

I chose a neutral gray and was hoping it carried a tiny hint of green in it.  I think the green tint is present (in person) but I almost think the shade is too dark for her room size.  I'm contemplating repainting it, but I'm still on the fence.

Here's the room right after we put the furniture back in place.  

I have been conscious of how much furniture I was squeezing into Avery's room, so I had imagined different pieces of furniture I could eliminate after we finished painting.  My mother-in-law asked to have the changing table as a Cricut table in her home and I was so ready to have it out of Avery's space.  For the moment, that means her books and overnight diapers are in a corner of her room, but they won't always stay there.  One day I'll get organized enough to find other storage means in her room.  I took a small wooden table from the boys' room to use as a nightstand for Avery.  With the boys having bunkbeds now, they no longer have a need for a nightstand.  The table is small but it fits a lamp and a diffuser, which is all we need at the moment.

Here is her room after we hung things back on the walls.  Yes, I am aware that her single letter "A" painting looks small on her wall, but she is proud of it because she made it and she refuses to let me hang up a larger beach scene painting.  She and my mother-in-law are working on painting a K and a P to add to the monogram.  Once those pieces are finished, it'll be more like a small gallery wall which will complement the space in a better way.

Until Next Time,
Much Love, Reba

Summer List of Things to Do

Now that I'm finished with my internship (WHAT?!?!) I can focus on doing some serious organizing around the house this summer!

I made a list of projects/wish-list purchases that we'd like to get done or buy this summer.  This list is probably not all inclusive, but I would like to challenge myself to see how many things I can knock off this list by early August.

• White curtains in dining room (right now I have black-out curtains in a chocolate brown shade, and even though I have them pulled to the side, it still darkens the room more than I'd like)
• New dining room chairs.  (the ones we have are this wicker/rattan material.  My mother-in-law gave them to us when she gave us our dining room table when she moved into her new house and purchased a different table and chairs.  The table is great-- I love it.  It's a big long rectangle and I can sit a lot of people around it.  The chairs, however, aren't my favorite. They're big and bulky and I cannot strap a booster seat to them-- which meant I had to hang onto two of my older dining room chairs so that my boys could have booster seats a few years ago.  Now that they're out of booster seats, Avery is just getting to the age where she can sit in a booster seat rather than a high chair.  I'd like to give Aaron's dad the original dining chairs (since he has the other four, plus our old dining table), but I need to keep at least one of these chairs for Avery. The boys aren't quite strong enough to maneuver the wicker chairs, so I'd like to get something a little more streamlined that they can scoot in and out easily.  And the biggest reason of all is that the wicker chairs are hard to clean.  A few weeks ago, Avery was sitting in my lap at the table when she suddenly got sick and vomited everywhere, to include the dining chair.  I could not, for the life of me, get all of the curdled milk out of the intricacies of the wicker chair.  Gross, I know. I'd like to have something smaller, more streamlined, and easier to clean!)
• Canvas of Avery for the dining room.  I currently have a canvas of both boys, and now that Avery is nearly two I suppose I should start putting up some nice photos of her around the house too.  Can you tell I've been busy lately?  Now that I have extra time to evaluate some things, I'm trying to make sure I hit all the "mom" items on my list. 
• Bunk beds for boys. (This is still up in the air.  Part of me wants them to have bunk beds so that they have extra space to play in their room-- our rooms are quite small.  But part of me doesn't want to deal with teaching them to make the bed from bunk beds, and I also have a sneaky suspicion that if I put bunk beds in their room that they would suddenly feel like they were world-class stunt doubles and attempt triple salchows from the top bunk.)
• Dresser for Noah. (Sweet little Noah.  He's been using half of the top drawer and the full bottom drawer for all of his clothes for five years now.  When he was born, I combined his clothes into Michael's four-drawer dresser.  Now that they're bigger and their clothes are bigger, it's about time both of them have their own full dressers to use.  This is also a case for getting bunk beds so I'd actually have space for a dresser in their room.  Currently, their single dresser is in the closet.)
• TV & TV stand. (When we bought our TV eight years ago, I assumed it could hang on the wall.  We bought an entertainment center shortly before buying the TV, so we didn't need to hang the TV on the wall, but I always assumed we could if we wanted.  I was wrong. The boys didn't mess with the TV while growing up, but Avery is another story.  I'm so worried that she'll knock it onto herself and I mentioned hanging it from the wall a month or so ago and that's when Aaron broke the news that it isn't capable of being hung on the wall.  We've toyed with the idea of getting a TV, but we've resisted since we don't technically need one. This would be a purchase justified for safety reasons, but we know we can put it off for a while too.  The TV stand is showing wear-and-tear now that it's eight years old and wasn't the most expensive purchase at the time.  One of the drawers was dropped when we moved into this house three years ago, which is fine with me.  I can get past cosmetic issues.  One of the glass cabinet doors randomly fell off about a year ago.  That was annoying since it closed off the DVDs, and Avery started making a game of opening every box and throwing DVD discs on the living room floor.  So now I have the DVDs on some of the side shelves, (which means I can't see any of my knick knacks) but she's tall enough enough now that she can pull them off of there, too, which also causes a mess and will cause a bigger mess if she pulls the glass shelf down too.)
• Office clean out.  We actually did most of this one this past week!  We cleared out all of the random boxes on the floor and actually have space in here again!  I have some work to do on the bookshelf in here, and I really prefer a nearly empty desk and right now it's covered with some of my internship binders and paperwork that I no longer need. 
• Garage clean out.  We get a styrofoam cooler each time we have insulin delivered to the house, so we have approximately 758 coolers and we don't actually have a need for these-- at least not all of them.  I'm going to take my Popa's advice and take some to Goodwill.  Now that I have free time, I can do that this week!  Noah and my mother-in-law were regularly going to the recycling place in a nearby city and they'd take some cardboard boxes with them, but they stopped going during the winter.  Now that I'm off, I can make a couple trips with Noah and get our cardboard box collection under control again.  We have a shelf unit in the garage and it's kind of full of things we don't need/use.  Aaron and I need to take a weekend and really sort through it.  That'll probably happen in the next couple weeks now that Upwards will be over and he won't be spending half his Saturdays refereeing soccer games. 
• Shrubbery outside of the house.  Avery had this tea tree or something outside of her window and it got out of control and was soon taller than the house and would scratch her window like Nightmare on Elm Street-- not that I would really know, but it sounded creepy nonetheless.  Aaron cut back the tree a couple weekends ago.  We have plans to trim back or tear out most of the bushes in front of the house and replace them with gravel and some smaller flowering bushes. 
• Deck stairs and pressure washing.  One set of our deck stairs was built right up against the side of the house, which doesn't allow rain water to drain well, so it stays on the cinder blocks and looks dingy.  We can borrow my father-in-law's pressure washer and clean off that area, and when we redo the deck boards that need fixing, we'll replace the stairs and leave about an inch of space between the stairs and the house. 
• Roof.  Our house is 19 years old, so it's nearly due time for a roof.  It seems about half of the houses in our neighborhood have been roofed in the past year, so we have plenty of neighbors to get recommendations from!
• Shop clean out. We have a barn/shop/storage building in our backyard and I have lots of photography things left in there that I need to tackle this summer and organize. 
• Linen closet clean out-- also known as diabetes supply closet.  I need to organize all of the supplies and arrange them in order of expiration date. 
• Master closet clean out.  Did anyone else save every wedding and anniversary card?  No?  Just me then?  That being said, I need to clean out the closet and examine if I actually need to save everything.  
• Boys closet clean out. (Their closet is full of bins of clothes they've outgrown.  Some of these we will give to Aaron's stepsister and her baby boy when they visit this summer.  Others we'll probably end up just donating.  I've been holding onto stuff to consign, but it just becomes too much and I don't like clutter). 
• Avery closet clean out.  See a theme? (Her closet is full of clothes that one day she'll fit into, and clothes she's outgrown.  Some of these we'll send to a cousin in Washington who just had a baby girl, and some we'll consign, and some I just need to donate). 
• Bathroom reno.  We're deciding how long we'll be in this home.  Eventually, we'd like to buy 15+ acres and build a home, but we know we're not there yet.  We don't plan to look for land until I get my tenure from teaching, which will be three years in the same district. So until then, we're trying to make our home comfortable for us while we're here.  We've had plans to reno our bathroom since before we got pregnant with Avery.  We'd like to convert our tub into a tiled shower and take out our shower-insert and install floating wood shelves instead. I don't think this is something we'll do this summer, but I figured I'd write it down anyway. 
• Paint kitchen areas.  Yes, I still have two upper corners of my kitchen (and behind my fridge) that are not painted. This frustrates me so much.  I just need to take care of this. 

Whew!  I'm happy to challenge myself this summer and try to get most of these things done!  

Until Next Time, 

Much Love, Reba