Project Organize: An Update

Updated on February 28, 2014

With the busyness of October – my 31 days series, my son’s birthday party (promise a post with lots of pictures is coming soon) and Halloween – I haven’t had any extra time to post about Project Organize and the progress I have been making.

I have been making progress and I will have a lot to share in the upcoming months. But, I will be honest, it has been slow going. Most of what has been happening at my house is not blog-worthy. There has been a lot of sorting, purging and rearranging.

I promised myself I would touch every single item in my house, and this takes time. And because I am doing some rearranging, often it takes a very long time for a space to be completed to the point that I can actually share after photos.

So far, I made two trips to the thrift store to make donations. My trips included about 4 big bags of ‘stuff’. It feels so good to be ridding our house of clutter! I have sold a few things on local yard sale groups on Facebook, and I have more to list in the upcoming weeks. I also passed along 4 giant bags of hand me down clothes to my friends. One large bag of clothes went to the consignment store and countless bags of trash have been thrown away!

Little by little I am chipping away at eight years worth of accumulated things and stuff. In my younger years before I was married I moved almost every year from apartment to apartment. Moving so often sort of forces you to go through your things. It is an easy time to make decisions about what to save and what to get rid of. Plus, you have to take into account your changing storage options. Living in the same house for the past eight years, while adding two children, a dog and three cats in that time, has amounted to a constantly evolving dynamic in our home and how we live.

Those of you with kids can almost certainly relate. As your child grows and changes, so do his likes, toys and belongings. You have to keep re-evaluating the space to make sure you can make it easy for your kids to take part in putting their own items away. And you are constantly purging no longer used or loved toys and clothes.

And as grown ups, we are not much better! After being in one place for so long, I think (at least for me) I tend to start ignoring what we have. I don’t always go through everything and truly look at whether or not the items in my home are used or loved. Many items are in our house only because they always have been there, even though they really no longer hold any value to us.

Going through everything has been over-whelming, emotional and stressful. I thrive on order and my house has been filled with chaos. We have been at the “it gets worse before it gets better stage” for months now!

{via Instagram}

If I keep up with the daily tasks of dishes, laundry, vacuuming and general cleaning, I don’t make much progress with organizing – maybe 15 – 30 minutes a day. If I work on a big organizing project, then those daily tasks don’t get done. Add a rambunctious, pull-out-every-toy-you-own-every-five-minutes three year old to the mix, and you have a recipe for a mommy break down!

However, I am feeling hopeful with the spaces I have already finished. It is much easier to find what I need, and those cleared out spaces help me breathe a sigh of relief! This is exactly the motivation I need to keep going and not just throw in the towel.

I would say I am about 2/3 of the way through the inside of my house. As I put the finishing touches on a couple of the rooms, I will be sharing them soon. I focused on using what I have to get organized – only buying a few select items I didn’t already have. These rooms are not getting the make overs I would like to give them, but rather for now, I am just focusing on having a place for everything (and for everything to be in it’s place!)

My goal is to be done before Thanksgiving so I can enjoy a less stressed holiday season with my family.

So tell me: Have you ever tried to organize your entire house? How did it go?