Organization: Guest Bedroom

  With the summer here (finally!) I have been making plans for a few months now to go through all of our storage in our house and doing some major house cleaning and organizing. Having storage is both a blessing and a curse.  Before my husband and I got married and lived in this house, he lived in a really tiny rental house that had literally no storage space. We stuffed things into closets in hopes that some day we would have more space.  When we moved into this house, which has 3 bedrooms, we decided to use one bedroom as a music room - my husband is a HUGE drum player - and the other bedroom would be for family and friends when they came to stay.  Well, we've lived here for 3 years now, and through the wedding and gathering of gosh knows what else you can literally not move easily in either room.  That being said, it's my summer goal to clean out the closets in both places and sell or give away anything we are not using.  I started small and organized the hallway closet, and today I decided I should attack the guest bedroom.

This is what I walked into this afternoon. My goodness.

 Now, to be fair a lot of this stuff is from my classroom - the pillows on the bed, the crates, the boxes, etc.  When we had to clean out our classrooms for the summer we had to take into consideration that we would have the Kids Inc summer program in our rooms for half the summer - which means going into organize and do long summer projects was not an option. So I had to end up taking a lot of it home with me to do here and there.  The organizing of the classroom I really don't mind - I love to think of new things in the summer and get organized and ready for the new year. Doing the work in the summer means I can focus on other things in the school year instead of organization.
Back on track - I had no idea where to even start in here.  So first ,I got all of my school stuff out of the way and then decided just to pull everything out of the closet - all the clothes, all the boxes, all the tubs, etc.  I usually try to bring our clothes to Plato's Closet here when we sell them but honestly, they hardly ever take anything - but I decided to try anyways. The big green tote is filled with clothes along with the boxes and bags on top of it. I put all the clothes into big garbage bags for my store run later.

Well, after 2 hours later going through everything I ended up with this in my dining room. Yes, all tubs, boxes, and bags, are things that will be either sold or simply given away. It felt SO good to get everything for the most part that wasn't needed out of the room. Who has this much stuff - seriously. It's ridiculous how much we have in our house and yet do not use.

I then made my way to Plato's Closet, Savers, Target (which is honestly my obsession place) and Office Max. I LOVE to label things so that everything has a place. For years I just used printed paper labels but after a while I decided I would really like a label maker - so for Christmas I gave in. :) But with all the organizing at school as well as at home, I had run out of labeler tape. So, I had to go buy some more, a few more tubs from Target (as well as look at everything else I walked by - seriously, it's an obsession) and then came home to finish up. 

I am super happy with how the closet turned out, and now each place has a happy little home along with a nice label on it. Ryan still has quite a few things to do through (those are ALL mostly his clothes left hanging up. He's a huge Bronco fan and we have more Denver stuff in our house than any other person - except for maybe my friend Bethanie) While it took most of the day it was a rewarding feeling - next step to tackle is the music room which is filled with all of our left over wedding things - someone PLEASE buy them from me! :)

Until next time!