Fall Cleaning 2013

I remember when E and I first started our house search.  We were living in a tiny one bedroom apartment at the time, so everything we saw seemed big.  The kitchens seemed to have so many cabinets.  There were so many rooms.  So many closets.  So much space.

When we moved in to our "big" house, we didn't even use the second floor.  We had our bedroom and office on the main floor, so unless we had visitors, we didn't really need the space.  Now, 6 years, 1 wedding and 2 kids later, our house is not feeling so big.  I feel like there is so. much. stuff.  Everywhere.  

So I'm working on fall cleaning here. I sat down with my home binder and some pretty lined paper to make a list.  I like a list.  A plan.  Something to show my progress.  My original plan was to do one item each day in October.  Then I got realistic and Little J's birthday would be a better deadline.  I feel like I should set some sort of reward for the end, but I'm not sure what that will be yet.

My list... yes, I do call one basement room the scary room.

Looking at my list, I have 3 areas I'm focusing on

Get ready for winter: As much as I hate to think about it, cold weather is coming.  And I'd rather get things put away in the fall like temperatures than wait until snow is falling.  So I'll be cleaning out the garage and cars, getting toys and outdoor furniture put away and cleaning up the yard.

Clean Out:  Donate or otherwise get rid of what we don't want/need/use.  We have so much.  E and I have a big closet full of clothes and shoes that we need to go through to figure out what fits, what we like/don't like, etc.  Same for the girls (though most of their clothes will need to be sorted and stored for later use).

Organize:  E and my mom would probably laugh, because this is my favorite thing.  I want everything to have a place (then we can work on getting things back to their places).