Guest Bedroom Cleanup

Well, change of plans. I didn't clean up and reorganize the bathrooms today, but the great purge of 2013 continued. Instead, I tackled the guest bedroom! :) Which is also my craft room and our storage room and for me was the most daunting room of all. So - there was a lot of stuff to go through. I doubled the amount of things I'm giving away and I threw away 3 large garbage bags of junk! It feels so good to purge! (My husband said we look like hoarders with all of the stuff we've thrown out and the boxes piled up in the hallway to donate!)

So, here are some photos of before and after. I started around 11:30am and had one break for dinner and one break to take the Christmas tree to the curb and finished at 8:30pm. It was a long day!

Before: View from the doorway

During: It looks really bad now! I pulled everything out of the closets...

After: View from the doorway. :)

After: View from my sewing desk (closets are to the right and fill the entire wall!)

Before: Left side of the closets

After: Left side of the closets

Before: Right side of the closets

After: Right side of the closets

I know this is not perfect and we still have a lot of stuff in these closets, but this is pretty much all of the storage that we have. The closets in our master bedroom we use for clothes! :) Plus, this is a guest room and a craft room and I have lots of crafting supplies. I bet if I didn't craft at all we would have a very clean apartment.

Speaking of crafting, did you see the quilt on my bed in the 4th picture? My great-grandmother made that for me in 1987. I was just one year old (or maybe less...)! I love it and it's super warm.

During this clean up I went through boxes and boxes of junk - things we had probably moved around with us since we left our parents' houses. I also had a ton of old mail (even junk mail) that was just stashed away in the closet. So, lots of things were thrown away and lots of things went into cleaned out boxes to be donated. My front hallway is almost impassable now because of all of the boxes to donate. We're taking a trip to Goodwill tomorrow after I get done with work. I hope it all fits in the car!

I came across a couple projects while cleaning that I want/need to do:

1) I saved some of the old T-shirts to cut into strips and knit into a couple rugs. I want to make at least 2 rugs, but I bet I have enough T-shirts for way more.

2) I had saved all of our wedding cards and I want to make a book out of them. I saw one that a good friend of ours had made by gluing them together into a spine of sorts. I think I may use some glue, but I'd like to sew them together with needle and thread like I did my upcycled journals.

3) I have some old quilt blocks that need to get made into a small lap-quilt or picnic quilt. That project shouldn't take more than an afternoon to finish up.

4) We need shoe racks to go along with our underwear drawer dividers. I wish I had a work space to make some things out of lumber, but I'll figure something out. Maybe Goodwill has something I can use... ;)

So - rooms left to clean out and organize:

• Master Bathroom
• Guest Bathroom
• Kitchen
• Dining Room
• Living Room

We'll save those for another day though. :) I hope you all are doing something much more fun! Happy crafting to you all!