As I had suspected, getting the big stuff done in Fletch's room wasn't too tricky. I got the drawers of clothes and shelves of books sorted in no time. But, as I started to try to clean up the other massive amounts of little things: legos, craft projects, comic books, I realized that it wasn't the little things that made Fletch's room so cluttered. It was the furniture. There was a chair from when he turned 2, and a giant toy table from when he was 3 still in there. Clearly, these weren't the right size for our big boy. Out they went - and already, the room looked a lot better.
The toy area before and after:
The hardest part of this room was that the kids were home and wanted to "help" the whole time. So, I put them to work: taking old sporting equipment out to the garage, sorting the endless piles of legos into useable pieces, figure out what the remote control we found actually controlled. Eventually, they got bored, and I got to finish up by myself. But not before we had a good dance around the room to some Buddy Holly covers I was listening to while we worked.
Let me go back to the Lego sorting for a moment. With the big toy table gone, I decided to reinvent the toy storage/shelf thing into a Lego workbench. That meant getting rid of all the junky plastic random toys that were in there, and putting the tubs to use to hold all the legos. It took about 3 hours, but in the end there was a tub for each of the following: Mini figures, mini figure accessories, generic bricks, big specialty parts, small specialty parts, vehicle parts, and mostly completed pieces. Now, if anyone wanted to actually rebuild the ti-fighter or power miners vehicle, they could find the pieces, and the guys to go with them. (I also have these Toy-Story like visions where all the mini-figures are glad to be in the same tub so they can hang out and chit chat when no one is around: "Hey Darth, How ya doin'?" or "Hey Batman" says pizza delivery guy, "Wanna arm wrestle?"
I also did a massive round of dusting. Lamps, vents, base boards, blinds. And, I cleaned the windows and sills inside and out. I even woke up a VERY BIG spider. It was actually funny, as usually there are lots of things around to grab and smush a bug with, but everything thing was put away, so I just stood screaming at it for a second before running to the closet to grab a shoe. If there was even an argument to leave a pair of shoes out; being at-the-ready for spider killing seems like a good one.
In the end, there were 2 donation bags, 2 garage sale bags, 2 trash bags, 2 pieces of furniture and a full vacuum cylinder of dirt taken out of Fletcher's room. It kinda blows my mind that all of that was jammed in there. Now, he can actually find his school uniforms, put his shoes in the closet, and play with his toys. Mission accomplished.
The Closet before and after:
The dresser before and after:
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