Purged

Last week, I spent most of my free time here:

And here:

And even here:

Yep, it was spring cleaning time in our abode...or maybe a more appropriate term would be spring straightening and organizing...and I had many areas on my list of places to be hit up: our living room closet, the laundry room, the playroom, the kitchen, my closet.  Sadly, most of those places were on my list last April when I did the same thing, but oh well, I guess you can accumulate a lot of junk in a year!

I've developed a pretty good approach to this task, so luckily the whole process really didn't take as long as I had thought.  Basically, when going through the contents of any given closet, I have four categories: stuff to stay where it is, stuff to trash, and stuff to take to Goodwill, and stuff that needs to move somewhere else in our house.  It always amazes me how throwing out or donating just a few items really does clear up soooo much more space, and thus leaves us with a much more organized space.

I am also a big fan of baskets and labels for keeping things organized in the future.  I have found that just having the baskets is nice, but inevitably things get tossed all over the place over time.  However, if  I take the time to put a label on the basket to detail its contents, I am much more likely to take the extra few seconds when putting an item away to put it where it actually should go.  Like in my craft closet:

Our playroom was probably the most in need of some reorganization/straightening.  I mean, I expect the room to get a little messy from time to time, but these boys have a ridiculous amount of toys and the room quickly becomes a disaster.  I bought some smaller boxes to hold smaller toys like blocks, magnetic letters, and cars.  I also went ahead and donated my book collection (I'm a read it once and be done kind of girl, so I don't know why I've been holding on to most of these for the last 10ish years), and used the new-found shelf space to hold some of the bigger toys that Colton plays with frequently.  Finally, I stored some stuffed animals and other toys in our playroom ottomans.  Between all that, the toy box is now functional once again, instead of being ridiculously overflowing.

With my two-year-old's short attention span, I'm sure the room will get messy again pretty quickly, but I'm hoping that we will at least know where to put the stuff when it is time to clean it up, thus keeping it from reaching the ridiculous level!

Anybody else been doing some spring straightening?  Do you have a system you use too?  Do share...