Spring Cleaning: The Livingroom

I did it! I Spring Cleaned one entire room! I finally buckled down and actually used the three step process in the e-book, Spring Cleaning For Normal People: declutter, clean, organize. See, you're supposed to take everything out of the room and throw it all in a designated spot. I chose our bedroom. Then you clean the entire room. Then you put everything back, that is, everything that actually belongs in the room. This doesn't seem too difficult but my first attempts were ridiculous. I would pick something up and then decide to take the object to the room it belongs in. Well, this takes forever and is really not efficient. It is much faster to throw everything in a pile and deal with it all at once. My entire living room really only took a couple of hours. After I had it all done and put back, I still had two bins of stuff to sort through. That took about a half hour to sort through and put away. And my living room has never looked more fabulous.

 As I was putting things back in place, I realized many things that simply did not need to be returned to their spot. Things that had lost meaning to me, or lost beauty, or lost usefulness. I think sometimes, we tend to put things back because it has become a tradition of sorts. "This thing goes here because we have always had it here." So I busted out of my rut. I used to keep a double frame in the cabinet. One side had my college graduation picture and the other had Stacey's college graduation picture. Well Stacey looks as handsome as ever in his picture but I have never liked that picture of me. EVER! But I felt like it just had to be there. Well, it's my living room and that picture is gone! We also had a few random baby pictures of Shannon in really odd frames that were each given to us by different people around the time of his birth. Now our walls our covered with beautiful photos of our family and all of our children so the beat up little novelty frames were also taken out.

Complete Organizing Solutions has been featuring a series called, "Picture my memories" where in she discusses taking pictures of those items that we only hold onto for sentimental value. The things that are sitting in boxes, not being displayed (because we don't find them to be particularly beautiful) and not being used (because the item is not useful). I have a storage bin full of things from when I was a little girl that I am thinking of doing this with. I want to take pictures of everything, make the photos part of a scrap book and then donate the whole thing. I have already begun this process with a few things that were in our living room. The top shelf in the corner cabinet is dedicated to items from our wedding and a few things that seem to fit in with that theme. Our unity candle, ring barer pillow, and flower girl basket also used to be crammed onto that shelf but I have taken them out with the intention of taking some pictures and selling them on ebay. I have always wanted to make a wedding album but we really don't have a lot for decent photos from our wedding. So I think the pictures of these wedding accessories would fill in the space and create a beautiful album.

 The shelf below that holds all three baptism candles and white garments from our kids' baptisms. It also has the missal that was given to me by my parents when I made my first communion. And to the right, Chloe and Shannon's rosaries and rosary book.

 And our family Bible sits on a desk in the corner of the room that you can't see in the pictures. My dad was Stacey's Confirmation sponsor and he gave this to Stacey after his Confirmation.

Now I can truly say that I find everything in our livingroom to be either useful or very beautiful.

Here is one last photo of Athena helping me clean.

Wish me luck as I attempt to complete this same process in every room in our house.