Organization=Happiness

Today I am going to talk about organizing our stuff and CLEANING house!

A few weeks ago I attacked my upstairs bathroom.  I’d have to say it’s one of my dirty little secrets since no one other than Matt and I see that room.  It’s really crazy to see how my beauty supplies had exploded.  I closed the door on them and suddenly they all had little beauty supply babies just sitting there collecting dust. 

A shampoo bottle with just ½ inch left in the bottom (because I had bought a new one to replace it and didn’t have the self control to wait until I finished that last ½ inch before I opened the exciting new bottle!), a hair-spray I bought but didn’t like the smell, a container of loose powder with a cracked lid that wouldn’t stay on, some really ugly green eye-shadow that for some reason I thought I could pull off…  What were all these things doing up here? 

That’s when I decided to trick myself:  I said “we’re moving… this stuff just has to go!”  Oh dear!! Do you really want to pack all this stuff in boxes, then move it and unpack it again to just have it sit there and collect dust? What a waste. I shall keep just the basics that I use every day, plus a few extra-fun items that I like to have for special occasions. (If you know me you know I’m not actually moving any time soon!  This was simply a trick! And please don’t start spreading rumors… because it just ISN’T true!)

Anyways… no pictures of that project.  But that was just the beginning.

A few days after I cleaned out my upstairs bathroom a disaster happened!  Matthew and Jersey (my cute puppy) were playing like crazy boys upstairs.  They do this thing where they run back and forth and back and forth and chase each other and jump and wrestle and it sounds like an earthquake coming from upstairs.

Well in the middle of this came a huge CRASH!  I ran upstairs to see what was going on and this is what I find:

(I can't help but notice how cute he looks sitting there next to his mess!)

Jersey somehow managed to catch his back hip on the side of our bookshelf and it tore the side off causing all the books to come tumbling down.  Seriously?  How is that even possible?  Well obviously it is possible.

So for the past few weeks we have been walking around piles of books in our bedroom because we didn’t have another book shelf to put them on.  Ugh! 

I decided that since we live in such a small house and space is so valuable I’d rather not replace the book shelf with a new one in the bedroom.  Instead I wanted to combine all the books on the floor with the books in our office downstairs.  We have two nice white book shelves that came with the house that are plenty big for only 2 book owners to have their books on!

And so the project begins… Here is our book shelf downstairs before I started clearing it off and organizing it.

And here is our book shelf now:  It took only about 1.5 hours total to bring the books down, dust, and re-organize.  And what a difference!

I went with the color blocking to make it look less cluttery! ;)  And I even had enough room to move some of the photos up top down to shelves.  My other half still wanted those two big things up top though for now! ;) 

One of my tricks for having such colorful spines was taking the sleeves off the books!  So many sleeves are just white/black boring colors:

(and yay!  I love to recycle things!)

Check out how beautiful the spines with no sleeves on:

 

It's pretty amazing how much less stressed I feel walking through the bedroom now with no books to step on!  And it's also pretty funny how each time I'm in the office I take an extra moment to stop and smile at my well done job! :)

Ok friends... now it's your turn!  Take 1.5 hours this week to organize something that you've been putting off!  What will it be?