Standiford Family

I was a huge fan of TLC’s “Clean Sweep” show.  (I don’t watch much tv any more so I don’t know if it’s still on or not.)  I loved the idea of taking everything out of a cluttered room and starting with a blank canvas.  No more clutter but good organization.  There was also a crew that helped sort and haul things as well as clean and decorate.  Today I did my own version of it in the reds’ room.  It’s been a huge mess for a while now.  We’ll get them to clean it but it’s not really clean.  They shove stuff (I’ll be using this word today instead of crap to try to keep the post cleaner) everywhere and then it’s messy again the next day.  I just had to do something about that.

I told them yesterday what I was going to do.  I thought maybe I’d let them help me sort and trash some stuff but after getting in my right brain I decided it would be a lot easier if I just did it.  Here’s what the room looked like before:

I spread out a blanket in the living room (on the show they take the stuff outside but I wasn’t doing that) and piled all the stuff there.  The kids helped a little with that.  I had to get Kade to go under the bed for me.  I don’t really fit very well but in the end I had to go under too.  Here’s the piles of stuff and a helper under the bed:

And here’s the room empty:

I don’t know how many hours I spent sorting, tossing, and deciding what to do with stuff.  It definitely took longer than I thought it would.  That could have been because Mat and Kade kept coming to check what I was throwing out.  I told them to stay away because I didn’t want to deal with any melt downs about stuff being tossed.  (I know, I’m mean.  But not this mean.  Love that blog!)  I still have a bin of stuff I don’t know what to do with.  Maybe I just need to throw it out.  Anyway, I filled 3 trash bags and had one BIG load of recycling.  My guess this morning was 4 bags of trash.  Not a bag guess if I count the recycling load as a bag.  I decided I had better wash their sheets too so they could have a really clean room.  Here’s the results:

This evening we took about 40-50 books to Goodwill.  We had enough to open our own library!  I feel good about that.  I also feel good about that room being clean.  I wish I would have had the time and energy to touch up the walls but that will have to be done another time.  If anyone would like to hire me all I charge is child care.