New Year Cleaning & Organizing

My Happy House {one of my favorite cleaning and organization blogs} is hosting a New Year Challenge to get people organized and clean. She has hosted a couple of these sorts of challenges in the past but this was the first one I decided to join in on.

As I've mentioned before, I'm not the best at cleaning or organizing. Yet another one of my New Year resolutions is to stay more on top of cleaning, and most of all GET ORGANIZED! I figured the New Year Challenge would be a great way to kick off this resolution.

The first weekly challenge was to organize and clean the bedroom. I just realized now as I was typing this that she actually said "bedroomS"...as in plural. I only got around to doing the master bedroom though. The guest bedroom will have to wait for another day!

Here's the list of tasks she gave us and how I did {green means accomplished, red means not accomplished}:

Closet & Drawer Systems

• Empty
• Clean Shelves & Drawers with all purpose cleaner
• Sort Clothing- discard any unwanted items, my target number is 10-15
• Put clothing back- I organize my hanging shirts by sleeve length, then by color. Pants go by color. Skirts, suits and athletic pants go in the bottom right hand side. Shirts in drawers get rolled as opposed to folded- fits much better that way! Sweaters are folded and place on the above shelves, again by color.

Emptied out drawer

All tidy and put back in the drawer...rolling the clothes really does make a difference!


Closet Before...cluttered mess!


Closet After...ahh organized and neat.


I made these hangers to divide different types of clothing.


My shoe area looked like a tornado passed through it before. Now it's muuuuuuch better!

Bed

• Remove all bedding and launder
• Remove everything under the bed- sort, giveaway pile, organize {we don't have anything under the bed}
  
• Slide bed over and vacuum underneath
• Dust & clean fan and or light fixture
• Dust entire bed frame
• Move bed back
• Replace under bed items...or not if they found their way to the garbage!

Room- Clean from top to bottom (dust falls...)

• Nightstands & Shelves- dust, organize, purge- keep them simple- treat yourself with a vase of fresh flowers!
• Clean windows- including sills, frame, edges, etc.
• Vacuum

The top of this dresser is a clutter magnet in our house. Now it's cleared off and sparkling!

All in all, I wish I had been able to accomplish everything but we had dinner plans yesterday evening so I was only able to get this far. I definitely plan on finishing what I started though over the rest of this long weekend.

The best part of it all was how I was able to go through and get rid of SOOOOOO much stuff. I'm terrible about purging my closets and drawers with any regularity because I get attached to things. But in this case I was just on a roll and I kept tossing into the trash or "give away" pile. I ended up with 5 bags of just MY stuff to give away...and that doesn't even account for the trashed stuff. AWESOME! So much more room now.

TONS of stuff to give away. Purging feels great!