Spring cleaning: The start

Well up to now I have been exceptionally busy all the time with dance comps and lessons and shows and haven’t really had much time to do a clear out. So now is the time to do it…

We have decided that we have a lot too much stuff so this will hopefully be a fairly ruthless clear out (maybe not by some other people’s standards, but definitely by ours), we have been trying to throw out a reasonable amount to charity recently, I think we have sent about 10 bags of stuff since Christmas. So not too bad, but we could do better.

Last weekend started the cleaning/clearing spree with a thorough cleaning of my bedroom, the kitchen, bathroom and hallways, although I didn’t really do much throwing away. Having said that we did completely fill the rubbish and recycling bins… This weekend we started on the throwing away. 

We went to IKEA and saw some shoe organisers which were reduced quite significantly, so being the IKEA lovers that we are we bought one each, when we got home we put them into use. 

 Here is the shoe organiser in use in Pippa’s room. Not quite filled with shoes but it hangs rather well on the picture rail =)

Not exactly neat…

lovely hanging rack!

So much more organised!

After that I have to say I was in a bit of a tidying/throwing out mood, so I went through each of my drawers/shelves. I put some items to scrap (mainly old socks which will go into making draft excluders), some items to charity, and some just went in the bin (probably only the underwear though) 

I realised I probably have a few too many pairs of jeans, although now significantly less, I threw out 3 pairs. But I do pretty much live in them…

How many jeans I had before…

So after going through the rest of my clothes (although not my dresses or coats, that will have to be done another time) this is the pile of what I was throwing out… Not bad considering I didn’t really throw out much of my winter stuff and the summer stuff will probably be cleared out either during the season or at the end of it.

I have to say I find it quite useful to always have a charity shop bag to hand (although actually we’ve thrown so much stuff away recently that we have run out of bags) that way you can easily throw away stuff if you don’t want it anymore.

In some of this tidying session I have been trying to ask myself ‘will I miss it?’ if I am unsure about the item. If I’m still unsure then I might keep it, but with the premise that if I haven’t worn it by the time I next clear out I will get rid of it. My exceptions to this is seasonal wear and work outfits, since for me these get worn much less often.

We also made a start on some of the other rooms in the house. Probably our worst rooms are the spare bedroom/sewing room and the lounge, our fabric stores are in need of some serious organisation, so that will be a massive task, but we also just need to get rid of things that we have been accumulating over the last number of years. I guess that is one advantage of living in a student house, each time you have to move house you get rid of all of the extra stuff you keep around.

But here is a picture of the stuff we have put out for charity just from today… our recycling bin is also already half full and the same with the refuse bin (they were only collected yesterday…)

to charity!

Hopefully I will manage to get a full day of decluttering in tomorrow as well. I want to sort out loads more of the fabrics in our sewing room and get it much more organised (although I have a feeling that might take me slightly longer) and it will be nice to get the lounge much more free from fabric…