5 Across and 8 Down

No, these aren't the clues for a crossword puzzle. They are the number of tiles width and length of my toy room closet. I realized that there were 40 of these 12 inch (?) tiles under all that mess while I was cleaning out.

By far, this was the hardest room I had cleaned. Hard because there was just sooo much stuff. Also hard because there was a lot of decisions to make: how many of those 30 puzzles do we need to keep? Should we save or garage sale the die-cast Thomas trains? How many bolts of ribbon do I really need? But, 2 garbage bags, a giant garage sale box, and a few keepsakes later, the toy room closet has been tamed.

In the end, the room got broken into 3 zones. First (and by far the biggest) was the kid stuff: by getting rid of all the baby toys there is now room for the puzzles and other boxed games down low. The kids can actually get their own things out now. I also repurposed a set of stacking shelves I found back in Vi's closet during week 2 to hold all the kid craft projects, crayons, popsicle sticks, etc. Second was my craft section. Clearly, this section of the closet SHOULD be the biggest - after all, at one point we had considered making this whole closet a "craft office". Ahhh, maybe down the road. But I had a few tubs and my trusty little sewing dresser. A tub for yarn and a tub for sewing. And, then there was the printing/camera section. By having a place for everything, it became a lot easier to put all the monkeys back in the barrels, and the printer paper back on the shelf.

Oh, and THEN, after the 20 hours I spent (yup -half a work week to clean out that sucker!), I still had the actual room to do: dusting and sweeping and putting away. I didn't find anything valuable, but I did find some creepy things under the couch. The ecosystem under the couch, with it's sticky popsicle wrappers and empty gatorade bottles was apparently the perfect breeding ground for a ginormous species of dust bunny. Perhaps more of a dust jackrabbit. Those things were colossal. But they are all gone now, along with a bunch of old magazines, papers and scraps of junk that had taken over the toy desk.

To celebrate the room being clean, I splurged on a spiffy piece of wall art from Target - see below. (As a side note, I generally feel that if something is not for sale on the aisles of Target it may not actually be worth having. Little did I know this transcended into the category of home decor). The results are a clean and happy room that is pleasant to hang out in, and a closet that any child can enter without risk of bodily harm.