A Belly, A Big Girl, and A Bigger Girl??: Project Purge!

My head has been feeling very cluttered these days. Sure, some of it can be chalked up to pregnancy, but most of it is sheer laziness. I have always been pretty good at keeping the stuff under control in my life. I would regularly go through my belongings, starting at about 18 or 19 years old, and throw away stuff. My half completed lanyards from camp, my bulletin board of magazine ads (random!), my cheap and cheesy vending machine claw-thingy stuffed animals. As time went on, I got less attached to stuff and the less stuff I had, the better I felt.

I am still that way, and as I go through Faith's things, I am very careful to hold on to things that are utterly priceless, like a hand written letter from her Great-Grammy, the only card written to her from GG even though it only says "Love GG", or her very first Notre Dame Jersey (to name only a few). The rest? It's clutter.

Well, as we prepare for TicTac's arrival, I find myself facing the one room that things just get thrown into... the Den (soon to be Faith's Big Girl Room). Since I was a kid and my dad had hundreds upon thousands of floppy disks, miscellaneous cables, and spare monitors, I am scared to death of having to tackle the task of fitting an entire home office into a very slim closet. However, organized right and purged of all the stuff, I have a feeling I will feel more liberated than ever before because I simply do not have a place for it anymore!

To make Faith's Big Girl Room, the Den needs to be completely cleaned out and moved to our Guest Bathroom's Linen closet. It's the smallest closet in the house, but I am up to the challenge.

This means cleaning out the Guest Bathroom Linen Closet. But where is all that stuff going to go? In the Main Linen Closet.

But the Main Linen Closet is already packed to the gills!! Where will all that stuff go??

So, the purging begins... I present, Project Purge.

Jason is working Overtime tonight so I had some time to myself to work. I pulled out my 5 (yes! 5!) boxes of unsorted pictures from the Main Linen Closet, flipped through them and threw any out that 1) I didn't know who the people were anymore, 2) I looked bad (I know, I'm so vain...and that song IS about me!), 3) Were just bad pictures. Of course, I kept a few that met one (or more!) of those criteria if they were one-of-a-kind, show-my-great-grandkids-where-they-came-from type of pictures. I didn't pause to reminisce. I just tossed... And felt good when my 5 boxes were widdled down to TWO!

Then I moved the boardgames from the two bottom shelves of the Main Linen Closet to the very top shelf of our Coat Closet (aka, Clutter Catcher). Anything that didn't fit, I am donating. Just doing that with the pictures and games cleared up THREE whole shelves in the Main Linen Closet!!

Then I moved the sheets and towels from the Guest Bathroom Linen Closet to the Main Linen Closet. And Voila! The Guest Bathroom Linen Closet is no longer... From here on out, that sucker is to be known as the Office Closet.

Tomorrow evening, I will have Jason move our filing cabinet (also a part of our purge! I want to clear out an entire drawer to be able to hold printer paper and other office supplies) into the Office Closet, if it fits. I measured, and it'll be close, that's for darn sure... but ideally, it'll happen. Then I will start organizing Jason's PC game booklets (any suggestions?) and our massive CD collection (already in Case Logics).

One step at a time, right?

Here are some photos of the progress I made. Unfortunately, I didn't take real "before" pictures of either closet, but I doubt this is the endgame for the Main Linen Closet project.