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!!

Day 7: Super Spring Cleaning!

I haven't cleaned in two days! I'm so terrible I know. But we're all human :)

To make up for my lack of motivation the past two days, I hit the mother load and tackled one of our extra bedrooms, and a little something extra! 

Here's what the beast has looked like for the past 3 months.
Side note: The people that owned the home before us had two little boys. They painted this bedroom in the cutest baseball theme - those are real Louisville Sluggers along the walls! Brandon and I are going to keep this extra room as is for now and hope we one day have a little boy who will love the Yankees ;)

It's somewhat organized in here, right? This room has become the office/catch all for EVERYTHING in our house. (Don't judge the kitchen table. It's our old one, and I'm not going to buy a desk when it works just fine!) Anyways, this room has been the epitome of me hoarding and not wanting to get rid of things. Besides the closet in the garage, it's the worst place in our house. 

I know it doesn't look like a lot in the closet, but so much of it is junk we can get rid of! 

Here we are in mid clean-out. Things got ugly real quick :O 

And here she is clean and beautiful! I even vacuumed, and cleaned out the windowsill y'all. I meant business. 

The closet looks SO much better, and now houses my cricut and all of our important documents. It truly felt so stinking good to get rid of a lot of junk in this bedroom! 

For the second project, I worked on the tops of our dresser. (The following photo is super embarrassing. Don't judge). 

This area is basically a culmination of my laziness. When we get home from work, this is where Brandon and I unload our pockets, I keep my jewelry here, and lots of other random stuff. I'm always too lazy to do anything with it by the time I get home!

Here it is all cleaned up! I feel so much better having everything covered, in its own little place and organized!

Lastly, this is a shot of all the junk I got rid of today. Every bit of this is trash - no garage sale items! Talk about spring cleaning to the max :)

Day 6: The Fridge

Today's clean out was super simple. Our fridge/freezer went out a few weeks ago, and we had to completely defrost it. In other words, we had to take everything out until it got fixed. I still managed to let things get a little crazy though. 

All I had to do is throw away anything that was out of date (and the obscene about of leftovers/takeout boxes). I thought about making some fridge liners that people post all over Pinterest, but in all honestly you still have to clean them. No help to me! 

Here she is all nice and clean! I could get a little more OCD with everything in the doors, but I know it wouldn't last long :) From this perspective it really looks like we have no food ... But I promise we do! We just have a big fridge ;)

Day 5: The Linen Closet

Beware. What you're about to view is not for the faint of heart. 

Our linen closet was in a horrendous state. Keep in mind that our regular bath towels aren't even in this photo (they were being washed). 

It's so easy to let closets like this get junked up! The only time I ever really go in here is when we need new towels, so it never gets the attention it deserves. Since Brandon and I lived on our own for several years before we got married, we have accumulated quite the collection of towels and sheets. I am a firm believer in not getting rid of towels until they are torn beyond use! So the majority of this closet isn't being tossed or donated, just organized. 

Here's what I decided to do: 

I ran into the dollar store and grabbed some of these white baskets to put everything in. 

We've got a basket for hand towels, kitchen towels, wash cloths and extra sheets. They are the perfect size for our shelves, and they keep piles of towels from falling over one another! 

Our bath and beach towels are simply folded on the bottom two shelves. I really can't think of a better way to store them. Do you guys have any ideas on how to better store bulky towels? 

Day 4: Yup ... More Cosmetics

So I have had this little pink shelf since I was a freshman in college. It has since become the catch all for lots of different things. Mainly, it is filled with hair products and other bath items I don't reach for as frequently. The top drawer even had some random craft items in it (glue gun, stamps). So needless to say, cleaning this out was well over due. 

This basket on top is home to an even more embarrassing collection. This is all bath and body works products and perfumes. Sad thing is - I didn't even buy the majority of it! 

This drawer perfectly sums up all that this beast contained. A lint roller, two necklaces, gauze pads, a Clorox bleach pen, and card stock. I told you it was a catch all! 

Cleaning this puppy out obviously created a mess before things got put away!

After sorting through everything, the bottom two drawers became extra hair items. Things like hair color, developer, hot rollers and things like that. The top two drawers are fairly empty and ready for other things in the house that need a home! 

Several of the bath and body products found a home in the garage sale pile, we know everybody loves that stuff ;)

Day 3: Under the Sink

Cleaning out my vanity got me on a bit of a cosmetic kick. The cabinet under our sink has been a disaster zone for months now. See for yourself. 

Hair products, facewash, stuff is everywhere. It's hard for me to remember what I have when it's all buried under one another! 

Cleaning this area out was simple. Throw away stuff that I don't use. So I did just that! 

Now yes, there is still a lot under the sink. But when your a girl, you need options for curly hair days and straight hair days, right? Things are much more organized and concise now. I even found a hair brush and some Moroccan argon oil I've been looking for!

Poor Brandon, his things are crammed in the back corner (his extra shave gel, and scent-a-way. Thankfully he's a simple man :)

Day 2: The Vanity

Well, I obviously have a problem. I collect makeup like no other. Seriously guys, you name it I've got it. From the cheap drugstore lip gloss to the Urban Decay palettes, I've got it all. 

Sweet Brandon bought me this beautiful vanity for Christmas this year - and I am so thankful! I finally have a place to store my massive collection. But that being said - I really needed to go through everything and get rid of some old makeup. (Especially the box that's been sitting there since we've moved - full of other random cosmetics). 

So today I finally tackled the beast! Here's the after photo: 

Wahoo! Everything is organized and beautiful now 👍 I feel so much better having everything at my fingertips. I can post some photos of each drawer if you guys like! 

And here's a super blurry shot of everything that got tossed - woohoo!