40 Bag Challenge Wrap-Up

Confession time: I got off to a rousing start with my 40 Bag Challenge, then promptly lost steam. It didn't turn out to be the precise and methodical project I had planned, but in the end a bunch of no-longer-needed items still left the premises, and several areas of my house are neater and more organized than they were before, and that's really what it was all about, right?

I did end up getting a couple of things done over the past week:

Another bag and box of "stuff" are off to Value Village:

And I finished things off with possibly my most satisfying endeavor of this year's 40 Bag Challenge; one of those dreaded items that had been languishing on my to-do list for far too long: Cleaning out under the kitchen and bathroom sinks.

Ever notice how those jobs that you dread for ages and procrastinate about endlessly sometimes end up being pretty quick and simple and you end up wondering why you didn't just bite the bullet and do them ages ago? Well, the under-sink excavations were precisely like that. It took me about 45 minutes to get both of them done and it wasn't nearly as unpleasant as I had anticipated.

I wasn't brave enough to snap "before" pictures (hey, even us bloggers need to have a few secrets!) but I'm happy to share the "after" ones:

The storage unit on the back of the under-sink door in the kitchen is now clean and organized! There was a bunch of junk hanging out here previously and now it's doing a great job of organizing my kitchen cleaning supplies. I'm pretty embarrassed to admit that I just now discovered that the bottom shelf is the perfect size for my dish soap and spray bottles (which were all crammed under then sink before). It only took me just shy of 9 years to notice this...what can I say, I can be a bit slow on the uptake sometimes :) The small spray bottle on the top shelf contains full-strength white vinegar, which I use the way many people use bleach: to disinfect cutting boards and counters.

 

 I made so much space under the sink that I can now stow my compost bucket out of sight. I am thrilled about this, as it's been perched on the kitchen counter for years, and although it's an attractive stainless steel bucket, I'd just as soon not have it in plain sight and taking up prime countertop real estate (which is in pretty short supply in our modest kitchen). The white plastic bin is corralling glass jars filled with dishwasher tablets and steel wool.
 

 This is under the bathroom sink, which is also a dramatic improvement from its previous state. Yes, there do seem to be a lot of bottles under there; the ones at the very back are extra empty spray bottles I'm keeping around for future use and the items in the blue plastic bin are ones currently in use. As you can see, I also have an impressive collection of used toothbrushes that are now fated to scrub nasty areas of my bathroom.

If you want to know more about the types of cleaners I use (a mix of homemade and store bought potions), you can find the details here.

All in all, although there are some areas I didn't yet get to, I am satisfied with the results of my efforts during this challenge. I may just keep going, even though the 40 days are officially over!

If you joined me in the 40 Bag Challenge, how did it go for you? Were you more or less successful than you anticipated?

40 Bag Challenge Update #2

It's time for another progress report on my 40 Bag Challenge. This week we continued working on cleaning out the boys' rooms, and started sorting through mine and hubby's clothing. We ended up with this addition to our donation pile:

Although my boys have an easy time sorting through their stuff and getting rid of items they have outgrown, for me it can be quite an emotional process to watch them discard items that were once much-loved and remind me of particular periods in their childhood. As I watch the last remnants of "little boyhood" exiting my house, I am reminded of just how fast my boys have grown and that the days when I will have someone climbing on my lap to snuggle up for a story or three are long gone. ::Sigh:: I suspect this a hard time for most mamas out there! Of course it is a lot of fun to have 12 and 14 year old boys, too (although I've only seen them for approximately 32 seconds today as it's March Break and they had a sleepover at their friend's house last night, rushed in to drop off their stuff, then promptly departed for the park.)

Whoops...got off on a bit of a tangent there :) I told you decluttering had a tendency to make me all wishy-washy!

My big success this week was unburying my desk, which looked like this:

Yes, more than a little embarrassing. While I don't have too much of a problem keeping the rest of the house fairly neat, my office is usually somewhat of a disaster. Paper clutter seems to be my nemesis! I'm not too sure why this is. I have a great system for organizing my bills, and they are filed as soon as I open them. Junk mail goes straight in the recycling bin. So what *is* all that stuff? A lot of it is related to my creative process - notes on blog articles I might want to write, recipes I want to make, interesting information related to local issues that I don't want to forget about. Yes, I know I should just file all this stuff - but my brain seems to work on an "if I can't see it, it doesn't exist" sort of basis. If you think it looks bad now, you should have seen it while I was in the thick of writing my book :)

Despite my previous failures with various filing systems, I've decided to give it another shot. After I was done sorting, tossing and filing, I was pleased with the results:

Hey, there *was* a desk under there after all! I am hoping I can keep it looking a lot closer to this than to the "before" picture - fingers crossed.


I think that puts me up to 10 bags/boxes of "stuff" that have been removed from our house so far. I may not make it up to 40 by the end of Lent, but I'm ecstatic to have cleared this much clutter in such a relatively short period of time.

If you've joined me in this challenge, how are you doing so far?

40 Bag Challenge Update #1

It never ceases to amaze me how much stuff I can find to get rid of every time I start a big round of decluttering. I haven't spent as much time on this project as I'd like to have over the past week, as I've been really busy working on promotional materials for my book.

I have made some good progress, though. The boys and I went through some other areas of their room and purged toys and books relentlessly. My hubby took 3 big boxes to Value Village yesterday, and after he left we found still more:

One of those bags is garbage, and one is for donation. The drawers you can see immediately behind are the bottom of the armoire I was aiming to get cleaned out this week, too. I did tackle one of the drawers, which was absolutely crammed with assorted papers, markers, pencils and about a jillion of my kids' old drawings. I went through it with the boys to make sure I didn't throw away anything they wanted to keep. Surprisingly, it wasn't too hard to select a few keepers and toss the rest into the recycling bin.

So far, our total purge count looks like this:

1 bag of garbage
1 bag of recycling
4 boxes + 1 bag of donations
1 box of gaming equipment sold

That's 8 bags/boxes of stuff out of our house so far - and I have a feeling there will be quite a bit more yet to come before we're done!

As so often seems to happen at our house, this 40 bag challenge has inspired yet another, larger project which will involve totally rearranging 2 floors of our house. Currently, my husband and I have our bedroom in the third floor attic, and the boys each have a separate room on the second floor. One thing that has been bugging me a lot lately is that we don't have a proper "family room" or den where we can all hang out together and watch movies, or just all be together doing a variety of activities (reading, playing board games, etc) while one or two people are gaming. We do have a living room on the main floor, but I am very firm that I do NOT want a TV in that room. Our basement is unfinished, and is likely to stay that way for quite a while given the large number of projects that are ahead of it on the list priority-wise. Our compromise was to have a TV in one of the boys' rooms, which gives them a space to hang out with their friends, and a TV in our bedroom, which gave us a space to curl up and watch DVDs/movies, but it's certainly not been conducive to the whole family hanging out in the same room together.

My brilliant plan (which has received approval from all of my family members) is to move the boys up to the attic, have us take over the larger of the two second floor bedrooms, and convert the remaining bedroom to a family room. I wasn't sure how the kids would feel about sharing a room, but they both seem fine with it and are actually excited about making a change. After taking a million different measurements and planning the rearrangement and elimination of furniture, and the redoing and re-designation of available storage spaces, I think it's all going to work out quite well. It is going to take one heck of a lot of work, though! Not only do we have to switch out three rooms' worth of furniture, we also need to redo each of the rooms as well. They all need wallpaper stripped, wall repairs, closet re-dos, painting, and new light fixtures (most of those things would need to have been done whether we switched the rooms around or not, as we haven't made any significant improvements to any of these rooms since we bought the house). There will also need to be some rearrangement of electrical outlets in at least two rooms. My husband and I are also going to go down from two closets to one, so a clothing purge along with a creative plan to maximize the one available closet in our new bedroom will be necessary as well.

We've all agreed that we're going to paint all three rooms white, so that we can easily switch out the functions of the rooms again in the future if we decide we don't need or want this arrangement at some later date. I feel both excited and exhausted at the thought of tackling this huge project; at least I have three other eager family members to help me out!

If you've joined me in this 40 Bag Challenge, how is it going for you? Have you been inspired to tackle any other large projects while you've been decluttering?

It's "40 Bag Challenge" Time!

I guess this must be the official month of challenges. Not only have I started my "local and organic challenge", I have also decided to do a "40 Bag Challenge", inspired by Sarah over at Clover Lane. The gist of it is to rid your house of 40 bags of clutter over the course of 40 days. Sarah does hers as a Lenten ritual, starting on Ash Wednesday, but you could start anytime you want! I think this is a great time of year to do this kind of deep decluttering as a kick-off to spring cleaning. If you want more details and guidance as to how to go about this systematic decluttering process, follow along with Sarah's posts on this topic every Wednesday. Hopefully I will have a couple of useful things to say as well as I go about my own 40 Bag Challenge! I really believe decluttering is an essential part of household management in a busy family home; in fact I even wrote a post last year about five ways decluttering saves you money!

We kicked off our 40 Bag Challenge last week by sorting through my boys' old gaming equipment and games. They have managed to accumulate quite a lot over the past few years and it was high time to do a purge. They had a GameCube they were no longer using, as well as a dozen or so games for it. We posted those on Kijiji and happily sold them yesterday (the profits are going towards a laptop they are saving up for!). We are also trying to sell a bunch of other games they are done with as well. We still need to do a more in-depth clean out of both of their rooms, but this was a good start.

Another area I decided to tackle early on was our container cupboard, which had degenerated to a horrifically disorganized mess over the past few months:

After taking everything out, sorting and purging I was able to get everything back in there in a much more harmonious arrangement. We had an unbelievable amount of lids for yogurt/sour cream containers (which I use to freeze homemade stock). A couple dozen more lids than containers - I have no idea how that sort of thing happens (I suspect they breed in the night). Tossing those, along with a few other lids that no longer had containers, cleared up a lot of extra space. I also removed a bunch of older plastic containers and relegated them to non-food use. Once I was done, it looked like this:

I am thrilled that I'm no longer afraid to open our container cupboard for fear of random items whacking me in the head, and I can easily locate what I need now without wading through a sea of jumbled-up containers.

The next couple of areas I plan on tackling are the armoire in our dining room, which is packed full of all kinds of random art supplies, games, and other assorted detritus which has randomly accumulated there, and my boys' closets, which are kind of frightening at the moment, too.

Care to join me in your own 40 Bag Challenge? I would love to hear how you do with it!