Household Unpacking and Organization, Part 1 of Many

Since I have been away from our blog for a bit, I thought I should try and update you on some of my progress around our new place. For those who are easily bored by pictures of household belongings neatly displayed on shelves and photographic proof that at least SOME of the rooms in our home are slowly becoming decluttered, just go ahead and skip this post.

The two areas in our home that have been the MOST cluttered, messy and disorganized since we moved in are Abigail’s room and the kitchen. In the case of Abigail’s room, all toys were pretty much dumped there, the kids generally used it for playing, and I just did not make an effort to cull through, separate and organize all their playthings. Lack of organization makes it hard to keep a space anything close to tidy. So, week after week, the mess got worse, Christmas busyness put some necessary jobs on the back shelf, then travel and final move out from the old house put the work off even longer. Hence, her little girl “sanctuary” has been anything but, for many weeks now.

Until last week, when during our snow day the kids and I went crazy working in there and moved boy toys to boys’ rooms, unpacked everything that belonged to Abigail, and went through carefully getting rid of things we might not need before setting her room up. Getting her things in order also involved going through the many children’s books we own, sorting them into proper age groups for our family, and also poring over all games/puzzles/creative, crafty toys and doing likewise. So, like many an organizational task, it touched on so many more places in the house than just the room we were “working on”.

While I wish I had some before pics to show you, so you could easily see just what a miracle has been wrought in Abigail’s space, at least I have some “after” shots. Here is a shot of as much of her room as I can easily capture in one camera shot given walls, doors and angles:

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Here is the saving grace in her room, and what I spent most of my time getting set up to be both as functional and as pretty as is possible for me: two floor to ceiling built-ins of shelves. The shelves are adjustable, so we had the joy of rearranging them to suit the best placement of her things. (The rearranging was NOT easy or quickly achieved…but I’m so happy with the finished product.) We were able to store most of what she uses/plays with on a regular basis in this space. Here is what we came up with:

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So for now, we are done in Abigail’s room. She has asked for the walls to be pink someday, which sounds like so much fun. And sometime in the future we will work out curtains and some other things. But for now, we are very pleased with the state of her room. I walk in there at least once a day and tell her, “I feel so happy in this room. It’s so peaceful and serene and NEAT!” And she smiles and giggles and proceeds to entertain me with her latest story or account of some such that has happened in the land of stuffed animals, blankies, horseys, and dollies.

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