Leah's Room - The organisation continues!

Leah's bedroom was a place I've been dreading cleaning out. Babies accumulate a lot of stuff... and her room showed that. Here are some before pics.

As you can see there was just too much stuff. I don't have a photo (of before or after) but I big part of cleaning up Leah's room was working through her old clothes. When I was pregnant I was very lucky to have lovely friends gift us clothes from when their wee girls we under 1. So I had a range of clothes from Newborn to 12 months. I bought 4 60l plastic bins and organised the clothes into 0-3, 3-6, 6-9 and 9-12 months, they even had pretty labels. Unfortunately this just allowed me to pile clothes in there when they were too small and not be too discerning on whether we'd actually use them again with other children. So my first job was to hunt through these and purge.

Another thing I've been desperate to do for a while is get rid of the feeding chair as Leah no longer has a bottle at all. Luckily I needed a new teaching chair and it's gone into school - clever! So much more room now.

Here's how the room is organised now.

Another major thing I did was organise Leah's books. She has SO many already, we just love books, but I was getting frustrated with finding her in her room reading to herself and accidentally ripping pages. So I put all the rippable pages away (see closet org) and only left out board books and special favourites that mum and dad like reading. Clever mum. Looks so much more neater AND meant that one shelf was free for musical instruments!

I also got around to putting photos in the two animal photo frames that I bought BEFORE Leah was born. Jeez. 17 months to get them sorted. Shocking parenting! Here is the ladybird one, you can see the elephant frame on the top of her book shelf.

 Purging some of Leah's clothes has meant that I had an extra 60l container to play with. I popped all Leah's crib linen in there. Cleaned up one of the shelves a treat. All of Leah's big girl books are now kept at the top of the closet. Everything else just got a spruce up in here and looks good now.

I made Leah a clip holder.... she was way too many clips.

Leah's easel was moved and now with the blackboard facing out she's loving it! She also loves eating chalk which isn't ideal.

Lastly, I went through all of Leah's toys and organised them into the baskets a bit better.

Looks great! Wonder what I'll be purging next week?

A week of organising the Kitchen

One of my 52 goals in 52 Weeks is to complete the 14 week of home organisation from a Bowl Full of Lemons.

I have said that I may take a little bit longer than 14 weeks but we'll see how we go. Once I get in the cleaning (and purging) mood it's good to run with it.

Week 1 is The Kitchen. Here are some before photos of our kitchen.

I do try to keep my kitchen (and whole house) as clean as possible and I also like to think I'm a very organised person, but I suffer from something many people do, over buying. I like things. I have the means to buy some of it, and boy do I!

The first thing I needed to do was de-clutter. So today I have got stuck into the drawers and cupboards. I got everything (or as much as I could as a time) out onto the dining table and then reorganised the cupboards and drawers. Was an all day job but I'm happy with the progress. I wiped out all the surfaces, threw lots of unused things away and am going to sell some things we no longer use to start my 'kitchenaide fund'.

Here are some before and after photos;

This isn't even half of it!

Leah 'helped' to get the bottom drawers done.

Day Two has seen me cleaning out the pantry and fridge/freezer. I do this fairly often too, but again, with such a small space, I'm never going to have a kitchen that is as elegant as the one from 'A bowl full of Lemons'.

Here is the before of my pantry - see, not so bad;

And here is the after, much less chaos;

And even though I do clean out my pantry periodically there were things I needed to throw out that just got lost in the back of the cupboard or not checked recently enough.

What I like about the new organisation is the spice and baking bits and bobs shelf, second down on the left as before I was always searching for my spices and herbs, or buying ones I already had hiding away.

It also gave me a chance to secure the labels on my baking items as they were looking like this;

And I must admit. I have a junk spot in my pantry. This is where I put packets of things that won't completely fit into containers, like a half emptied caster sugar bag.

Again, the fridge and freezer are something I've recently cleaned too, so there is nothing expired etc in there. Yay! Just a quick wipe out. Here's the freezer make over.

One other thing that I've done recently is something else The Bowl full of Lemons blog talks about in the kitchen post, so thought I better cover it too. Our sickie drawers. Even with pretty labels, go me!

The last day of our kitchen clean up (today) saw us wiping down all surfaces. The place is sparkling. One issue I have just moved for another day though (and is also another 52 in 52 goal) is the cook books. Oh boy.

Here are the finished pictures of our kitchen.

I'm super happy with the amount of stuff I was able to part with and I'm keen as to get stuck into the other areas of the house. It makes things a lot easier to clean when you don't have as much. Something I'm still wanting to do is clean the curtain above the windows and clean the windows, but that's for another focus :).