My first big step was to de-clutter our house. While I've managed to be three quarters of the way done it has made a huge difference in the flow of things. It took me several months to take everything out of the our walk in closet, utility closet, craft cabinet, book cubicles, and the most dreaded of all...TOY ROOM!!! AHHH
My first project was creating 5 tubs for Holiday stuff. The items that seem to never get organized are now organized!! Two tubs for Christmas Decor, one tub for Autumn/Halloween (that was hard) and one for Spring/Easter decor. I also had a tub for candles, wrapping paper, bows, loose pictures, etc.
I had so many holiday items that I no longer put out but kept holding onto and these items had no real significance to them so why keep them??? Goodbye! TOSSED!!! Autumn was the hardest of all seeing how it's my favorite holiday and I love LOVE to decorate! What I wanted to let go of was holding onto faux pumpkins and colored faux leaves, etc and perhaps incorporating with real decor. So I purged a lot of my faux items...less is more, right?
The biggest tackle of them all was the toy room. This has been living a life of it's own...it's been growing and growing and growing!!! The girls played with less then half of the stuff in there and the other half they probably didn't even know was there! We had an explosion of puzzle pieces here and a Barbies leg there...a crumpled up plain brown box that they just HAD to have to make into something weeks ago now forgotten and tossed aside. I've tried cleaning and organizing this room but as I said it has a life of its own and it somehow turns into an explosion within days of me cleaning. The girls do their share of straightening it up but let's face it, a 4 and 7 year old just cannot organize. Something had to be done.
I took one toy cubicle shelf in the toy room and the book cubicle shelves and created a checkered patterned toy shelving system with those cute little cloth cubicle bins and placed it on an empty wall in Nora's room. There are a total of 15 cubicle cloth bin slots for toys so I told the girls to pick out what they wanted in the toy room to keep and place it in the cloth bins and everything left over would go away the next day. Well at first, they didn't take me seriously so I had to scare them and took a garbage bag and started throwing away all of the toys on the floor...then they panicked and started really going through the toys and picking out things they wanted to keep. It worked!
So I then took the now empty toy room and turned it into a Library/Craft/Dressh Up Room!! In the closet I have board games and puzzles. I have a cedar chest filled with all sorts of dress up shoes, dresses, hula skirts, you name it that I've collected from garage sales/thrift stores.
I have 3 large stainless steel shelving units with all of their books on and a long metal vintage table with two bar stools which is their art table! They each have their own sides and art tubs with their names on it. They absolutely love it and have been keeping it somewhat tidy. I think a "Creative Room" is so much more exciting then a toy room, don't you think?
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