30-Day Organization Challenge, or How I'm Dealing with "Stuff"

One corner of the room -- and this was after I had already moved some boxes.

Caregiving.com started a 30-Day Organization Challenge for members on November 1. Denise is providing daily prompts for folks who want to follow along and spend 15 minutes per day organizing a purse, a mud room, bills and receipts (which would take me three months alone!), or under the kitchen sink. Members also have a choice to pick another project to organize. Since I knew I'd spend more than 15 minutes per day on most of the prompts, I decided instead to tackle one large project.

I couldn't move far enough into the room to capture the entire mess in one corner.

Since we're trying to work together on projects, I approached my husband about this organization challenge. He makes beautiful hand-made baskets and he could bring in income with these baskets if he had a larger space to work with. For the past two years he was stuffed into a corner of our bedroom, with no room to work at all.

The chifferobe? It's for sale (local only)!

I suggested that we clean out the 'spare' bedroom that isn't a bedroom at all. As you can see from the photos, this room is a catch-all for my clothes as well as for my mother's things that I'm salvaging from my parents' home. The room was, on day one, so dysfunctional that I couldn't find clothes to wear. For the past five days now -- every day this month -- my husband and I have spent approximately 15 minutes per day moving things back and forth between our bedroom and that spare bedroom. You wouldn't believe the difference already!

The books are mine -- but most of them will go up for sale on Amazon. That's just one bookshelf out of ten in this house. A little bit of a nutty obsession -- each book I own has a story behind it.  The clothes? They belonged to mom. What the heck am I doing with them? I'll figure it out...

This project could have been a daunting task, but with my husband's help it's coming together quickly. At this point we're just moving things back and forth, though. The task of going through all the boxes and organizing things is going to take the rest of the month, I'm sure.

I'll post "after" photos when we're done. Then we can tackle the living room, which is almost 1/4 filled with more boxes from the folks' house. Oy.