Tidy Home Tuesday: Week 5 - The Office/Spare Bedroom

Sorry, I kind of disappeared on this challenge! 

A few things happened... 

1) I have a small house, and I've noticed that it's much harder to find time to dig in to cleaning and organizing as I move closer to Jack's bedroom.  Because I'm left with rooms that are adjacent to his, I can't really clean during his naps for fear of waking him and of course setting aside enough time to clean a whole room while he's awake isn't very easy.  So I had to find time while Mark was home. 

2) The holidays snuck up on me and I found that it's much harder to get everything ready for Christmas when you're also tending to a baby! 

And 3) I didn't realize anyone was following along with me until they said something about it because no one was commenting ::side eye:: 

Moral of the story is, I'm hoping to get back on track now and finish up this challenge! 


This week's assignment is the Spare Bedroom. 

We happen to have ours set up as an Office/Dog Room/Place-to-throw-everything-we-don't-know-where-else-to-put.  If you're anything like me this room is probably filled with clutter and things that need organized and purged.  And, again if you're like me, you've been putting it off and ignoring the clutter. 

Let's get started. 


Here's before: 

YIKES!

Step 1:  De-clutter!

I don't even really have general guidlines for this... because I wasn't sure where to start for myself.  I just found a place adjacent to the only floor space still showing and started sorting things into piles: donations, trash, recycling, things that needed to be moved to the garage for storage (then it becomes Mark's problem!  Muahahaa!), etc.  Then, rehome things accordingly. 

We have a lot of different things in this room: books, mail stuff (envelopes and that sort of thing), office items (documents, paper shredder, supplies), and tons of craft things (paper cutters, art supplies, scrapbook paper, fabric, sewing supplies, yarn, etc. - and there's A LOT of  "et cetera"!).  Although I wasn't sure what exactly to do with it all, I just kind of grouped everything together as best I could and found a bin or drawer for it to call its own. 

Those two short paragraphs really don't describe the amount of time I spent in this room, but we'll move on. 


Step 2: Clean!

There wasn't a ton of cleaning to be done in here for me, but I did dust and vacuum, both of which desperately needed to be done.  If you have your spare bedroom set up as a guest room with a bed, now might be a good time to strip the bed and wash the sheets, which may have been sitting for a while. 


And after:

I still have to move out the bassinet that's sitting under the window.  That will go back into storage in my parent's basement and we're planning to put a toybox in that space to hold all of the toys that Jack got for Christmas!  Because... we don't have anywhere else to put them right now. 

And the big box in the corner of the last picture is holding a surround sound system, which has yet to be installed.  We need to do that so we can get that box out of there! 

But, things are looking so much better and hey!  There's a floor!


My goals for keeping the office clean:

Daily/Weekly/Monthly Task:  Don't dump stuff in there and put things back where they belong!  Seems like an easy task, but somehow this room always gets messed up again.  ::blushes::  I swear, if you dump just a few things in there they mate and you come back to a room out of control with clutter babies! 


Alright, let's see your spare bedrooms!



You have until next Tuesday, January 4th to complete the assignment and blog about it (feel free to right click and save my "Tidy Home Tuesday" graphic to use in your post!).  Come back to this post and link up to your post.  If you don't have a blog just leave a message in the comments about your progress!