Cleaning Out

I am desperately trying to clean out the guest room to prepare it to become Katherine's "big girl" room. My goal is to move her into her new room in April so that she does not associate it with being displaced by her baby sister.

Our guest room has been a spare room that is a catch all for everything for the past 4+years since we moved into this house. It has been quite a chore to clean it out and it has led to cleaning out many other areas of the house. This is not a bad thing as our entire house really needs to be purged of a lot of stuff but it is making it take a lot longer than I had hoped to clean out the guest room.

Here are a few pictures of the room before I started cleaning it out.

The bed full of stuff
Hmm, my childhood desk, a box covered by a quilt, an antique (broken table), an exercise ball and a bookcase. A very random collection of things for one corner.
The closet full of all kinds of random things.

I started really by cleaning out my closet. Yes you read that right, my closet, not the guest closet. Hmmm, my closet is not in the guest room. Why would I start there? Well, in the guest closet are all kinds of things like my off season, outgrown and maternity clothes. Also there are some Christmas decorations, all of my gift wrap and gift bags, costumes (from years as a youth leader and camp counselor), leaves to our kitchen table and travel gear. When I clear out that closet, I will need to put all of that stuff somewhere and a lot of if will end up in my closet. So I now have a clean closet. I have cleaned out and given away a lot of outgrown and outdated clothes. I have put most of my summer wardrobe in bins in the garage and made room for my maternity clothes. I also cleared out a lot of space on the shelves for things like the travel stuff and Christmas decorations.

Next I cleaned out under my bed. Again, why my bed? Well, gift wrap is under the guest bed and now it and the table leaves need to go under my bed. I am embarrassed that under my bed was about 3 years worth of magazines and books. It seems that when company is coming over they get neatly stacked under the bed and out of sight. Luckily that was easy to clean and I put

the books on shelves and trashed a lot of the magazines with a goal of trashing at least one additional magazine per day. While there was nothing under the bed, we moved all of the furniture around and did a good vacuuming of the floor. Probably our floor under the bed has not been vacuumed since we moved in. It is amazing how dirty it can get under there.

Another day I ended up working on my craft armoire in the office. Yikes, still not in the guest room. That is because under the bed in the guest room was also some random scrapbooking stuff. When I went to put it in the craft armoire, there was not room so I started to reorganize my crafting supplies. I did not totally clean out my scrapbooking stuff but I did make room for everything I needed to put in the armoire.

The closet is now almost empty. The Christmas decorations are in the attic with the exception of the candles which will melt. The travel gear is in my closet. I spent most of a week organizing my gift wrap, gift bags, bows, ribbon and tissue paper. That stuff is breeding in my closet. You can see the fruits of my labor by a rainbow colored box of tissue paper (I know-Type A). Most of that is in the hall closet or under my bed.

There is still a lot to do and there is no telling when Katherine will finally get to move into her "big girl" room. But, when she does, the entire house will be a neater, cleaner place. And that my friends, is a very good thing.

I do already have bedding for both girls' rooms already. I found Katherine's on clearance at Pottery Barn. Her walls are yellow and it will match perfectly. She likes it a lot and talks about her big girl bed.

Even though we are having a second girl, we planned to buy both a new crib and new bedding. Both were handed down to me by college roommates (thanks Ashley and Diana) so we don't feel badly about spending money. I think it will help Katherine who is in the possessive "mine" stage to have it different and it is just fun to redo. The walls in that room are blue. It is not the easiest thing to find blue girl bedding that is cute. I found a new set on Craig's list this week and you can see it below. It came with everything but the pictures, mobile and lamp.