Only 1 room left. And it's the biggest, scariest and messiest of them all!!

So remember, right after last Christmas, I went on a cleaning and purging rampage? Well, I have to say that I did a great job down stairs. I gutted, purged, cleaned and threw a lot away. It was wonderful and felt great but then life got in the way and slowed me down and then I lost momentum all together and upstairs never really got attacked.

Our problem is that we just have too much stuff. We are so blessed to have all this stuff but it is just too much. I'm done with stuff piling up everywhere and not having a place to belong. It either needs a "spot" where it goes or it gets tossed out. That is my motto.

We had moved Evan downstairs when Trevor was born and moved the office upstairs into the toy room. As you can imagine, an office in a toy room is not the best fit. I didn't like letting kids go play in there because they just couldn't keep their hands off my desk. No matter what I said, something would draw their attention (like sticky notes, Sharpie markers, tape dispenser, etc.) and they couldn't resist. So I had a "no kid" policy in the toy room. Bad idea but it was what we had to do to function. 

But I couldn't stand it anymore so I wanted to move Evan back into the "boy room" but to do that I had to make room for him and his clothes in there and that is where the cleaning/purging bug bit me again. I have been on the rampage ever since. The boys room got attacked, the office got moved back downstairs and so the office room was attacked, the toy room got revamped and last weekend it was the girls room. 

Here is a finished picture (forgot to take a "before" picture but imagine you can't see the floor and the dresser is covered in stuff and that's how it looked.)

I pulled 3 bags of clothes out, 2 big bags of garbage and I still have a huge pile of toys and things to donate. Wow - does their room feel good! Plus, the bonus is they can actually keep it clean now!

 Woo Hoo!

That only left our room, bathroom and closet to be done. I honestly didn't even know where to begin. Our room, bathroom and closet have become the "stash" it rooms. Everything gets deposited somewhere in one of these rooms and they were all a disaster. I just felt completely overwhelmed. So I started in the closet. It was the smallest room so I felt like I could actually tackle that one.

So are you ready for the big reveal? I'm going to show you the "before" pictures. It's very embarrassing but so worth the "after" pictures. Ok, here we go:

Our closet is actually quite big but with all the junk we had in there, it felt sooooo small. Look at the tiny space we had to stand to reach everything.

Yikes!

But look at it now!!!!!

It seriously feels like our closet has quadrupled in size! I love going in there now!

This is looking to the left of the closet door "before":

And here is the after:

 Heavenly!

 Ok, so that wasn't so bad. Maybe I should do the bathroom? But it was really bad too. The counter was a very convenient "stash it" spot but yesterday I decided to be brave and go for it.

Here is what it looked like:

And now:

We used to stack the towels on the side of the tub but it always looked messy.

Once the closet was cleaned, I found a spot on the shelves to stack the towels so now the bathtub looks great!

Oh, it feels so good to get rid of stuff. The last 2 weeks I have had a pile of garbage in the garage because I kept overflowing the garbage can. Literally the garbage truck came and I reloaded the can with all the garbage in the garage. The can was full and the truck wasn't even off our street yet. This week we finally got rid of all the garbage in the garage.

Now, the only room left is our room. I won't lie - it's bad. It has become the ultimate stash it room. Everything from the closet moved to the bedroom. Now I have to go through all the papers and files and decide what to keep and where to keep it. Oh man. It's completely overwhelming.

But I better do it soon. It is very stressful walking into our room because we just feel gross and yucky. Last night Kurt threatened to sleep in the closet because it is so much cleaner. ;-)  

I better get cleaning! Wish me luck - I'm going to need it!