Day 13: Extra Bedroom

So it's been a week since I've blogged/cleaned anything out :0 oh no! I'm a slacker, I'm sorry! I have not forgotten about this challenge!

Today's task was simple, go through our second extra bedroom.

The closet itself is the worst part of the bedroom. It's where we keep our luggage, my bucket of craft supplies and basically anything that doesn't have a home yet. As far as the bed goes ... yeeeah. Obviously no one has stayed over in a while! These are most of my heavier winter clothes that have migrated out of our closet, and are patiently awaiting their new home. 

Going through everything was fairly simply. Just about everything in the cardboard boxes went into the yard sale/donation pile. I took all of our bags and luggage and stuffed them in one another in order to save space. The clothes are hung all nice and neat, and just like that we have a clean extra bedroom!

Day 12: A little bit of everything!

Today is our day off - woohoo! Which means I had an abundance of time to clean :) 

We started early this morning detailing the inside and outside of our cars. It may not necessarily be "cleaning out," but it counts for something, right?! 

Then I tackled the mess that is our main closet. 

We have two large closets in our master bedroom. One houses all of our work clothes. I like to keep them seperate from our nice clothes, mainly because you just can't wash out all of the chicken gunk/smell. This main closet is the majority of our nice clothes. Pictured above are just my clothes, Brandon is on his own when it comes to going through his :) 

My main issue in here is no organization, a massive heap of scarves, and shoes everywhere. 

After going through everything, I came out with three huge bags - all ready to go to Platos Closet! They ended up taking only 14 of my items, and gave me $34 for everything. I certainly won't complain about that! Everything left will be donated. 

With everything remaining, it was time to organize. 

I finally took the time to hang up all of my purses. This nifty little thing is actually a hat hanger I bought from Wal-Mart, but it works just fine for my bags. 

The purses that can stand on their own are up on the shelf, as well as my scarves. I need to get another basket to put my winter hats/gloves in! 

Lastly, I went through one of our nightstands. I forgot to take a before picture, but I threw away lots of trash and junk that was just taking up space :)

Day 11: junk in the trunk

That's right. Today I cleaned out the junk in my trunk. 

Now I usually don't keep this much random stuff in my car. My mom had gone through some of my things at her house and dropped all of this off for me to sort through. That was 5 months ago ... So I finally went through It all. A lot of it was old shoes and things that were easy to go through! 

She's all clean! 

*Bonus* I also went through the island in our kitchen! 

This area really hasn't been that terribly cluttered; but it has just been needing Better reorganization. I also opened up the new knife block to replace our current one ( which has been frustrating me for months). All of the boxes in this cabinet are extras or duplicates of things we received for our wedding, but they just aren't worth throwing away! Better to have backups than going out and buying more, right? 

Day 10+ : the iPhone

Today I was blessed with a new phone - woohoo! Instead of logging into my iCloud and just transferring everything over to my new phone, I decided to give things a fresh start. 

That included manually entering all of my contacts - that may have been a judgement lapse. But it was much needed! I have had the same contacts in my phone since my iPhone 3G from freshman year of college. In other words, I don't talk to 50% of my contacts anymore! I weeded out everyone I'm no longer in contact with and have a significantly smaller address book now! 

I also seriously cut down on my apps. On my old phone I had almost 3 full pages of apps. Half of them never got used! 

I managed to slim my apps down to really only one page. This is my home page, nice and open :) 

Here is the second page, and that's it!! I'm sure I'll think of a few more apps I'm missing, but my phone is seriously de-cluttered. 

On a serious note though, our generation is so dependent on technology. Don't get me wrong, I love my phone and iPad bi am guilty of spending a great deal of time on them though! This is my way of hopefully cutting down on phone use (and saving gigs for that next software update ;))

Day 10: Dresser Drawers

There is nothing harder for me than getting rid of clothes. Yet there is nothing that makes me feel better than getting rid of them! It's a conflicting process really. So today I was in the mood for cleaning out my dresser. 

*Disclaimer - these are the clothes that I'm comfortable with folding, I have a lot in the closet. I'm also switching into spring clothes, so they're a little empty!*

Here's just a snapshot of what this dresser looked like - a hot mess. 

Drawer #2 - folding all my shirts into thirds means they fit vertically in rows! I love folding my shirts like this as opposed to on top of each other so I can see what each shirt is. 

Drawer 3: sadly my jeans won't fit in the drawers like my shirts do, but they still are more organized! The palazzo pants fit nicely though :)

Lastly is the pajama drawer. Not much of a rhyme or reason here, they're just in there however they will fit! 

Out of this section of my clothes, I made a rather large pile of clothes to donate!

Day 9: Coupons

Today's organizing was something I really enjoyed! I came up with a new way to store all of my coupons. 

Before today, I kept all my inserts in a messy pile on the table. As I needed coupons, I flipped through them and clipped whatever I needed. 9 times out of 10, the inserts were out of order and missing pages, and I was letting tons of coupons go out of date!

Here's all the out of date coupons I was hoarding. Such a shame to let them all go to waste! 

To keep them more organized, here's what I came up with. 

I've had this cute binder for a while (thanks Target), and decided to finally put it to good use. 

In the front, I used baseball card holders to organize already clipped coupons. I'll probably keep store coupons, and rain checks here as well. I've tried this method before, and failed miserably. This time I'm only going to clip the coupons and I need them, so the coupons here are ones I will use the next time I go shopping. 

The rest of the binder is just sheet protectors, that hold each individual page of the inserts. Any multiples I have are doubled up to save space! 

I've also labeled the beginning of each insert with a sticky note to make hunting for the right coupon that much easier! I'm hoping that through using this method I'll be able to easily see what coupons I have, and not let any go to waste. I'm also going to try shopping with this bad boy. Every time I go out, I see something on sale that I know I have a coupon for - it's just at home. Lame, I know! Hopefully this will keep that from happening :)

Day 8: Medicine Drawer

Today's cleaning out was super simple. I sorted through our mess of a medicine drawer. 

Town of Hot Mess: population 4 ibuprofen and 3 cough drops. Seriously though, what does a person need with 4 bottles of Ibuprofen. Basically all I did is throw away outdated medicine and reorganize things!

Here she is all cleaned up! Easy to see everything and and so much more space!!