January Clean Up

We've been busy since I last blogged!  We finally took down all our Christmas decorations, and even though I'm always sad when the holidays are over, I sure love feeling like my house is shiny and new and not so cluttered!  When we took the holly off the banister, Craig commented that it looked like when we first moved in, and it felt so lovely!

Craig was also taking some vacation days, so with him around, he had a bunch of re-organizing he wanted to get done.  We've always kept all our DVDs in the living room where the TV is, but since a lot of the stuff we own can be streamed now, that just seemed silly to have them cluttering up the room so much.  So we moved all our DVDs down to the basement (the TV down there has a DVD player, but no streaming, so that made perfect sense), which freed up our bookshelves for actual books!

The bottom shelf is for games and toys, the second-to-bottom shelf is for library books and church stuff.

And THEN, for the basement bookshelves, Craig organized the books by color, which makes me happy.  So our bookshelves are pretty and de-cluttered, for the time being!

AND all the DVDs are alphabetized!

Craig ALSO re-installed the downstairs TV and put all the wires in the wall, so it looks much cleaner.  That's the kind of thing that I would never do, but it sure looks way better!  It's so great having a handy husband!

We also had purchased a headboard for our bed, so that was another evening that Craig spent putting that all together.  (It was made much more complicated by the fact that our bed is too heavy to just move.  You sort of have to take it all apart and then you can move it a few inches.)

So grown up, having a headboard and all!

All this was over a week ago.  As soon as that was done, we ran out and bought ourselves a new TV to go in our bedroom.  I'd never seen the point of having a television in our bedroom-- I mean, I don't need to watch TV in bed!  But then my son decided he wanted to try live-streaming himself playing Minecraft.  And his computer is in the same room as the tv.  Which meant I found myself in a shush-ing battle with my teenager each evening and it was not. fun.  And suddenly having a tv in my own room where no one else would bug me seemed like a marvelous idea.

We weren't planning on buying one quite so quickly, but then we also got our stimulus money, so we figured, Why not?

Once again, Craig had to do it just right by installing an outlet behind the TV and fishing all the wires through the wall so we wouldn't have cords dangling all over the place.  He spent all Saturday afternoon on that task:

So clean-looking!

On Monday, Craig did my shopping for me (my credit card numbers were stolen, so I had to cancel my card, and until the new one arrives, I feel like I can't do much of anything!), and when I helped him carry everything in, the state of our garage was driving me bonkers.  I had just finished exercising and was all warmed up and not bothered by the cold weather, so I just plunged in and began organizing.  Before I knew it, I was digging out everyone's shoes and getting those all sorted, too.  The process took forever, but when I was done, we had this:

Reminds me of our glory days when we parked TWO CARS in here!

I learned that I could have saved us a chunk of money if I'd just kept track of everyone's shoes and passed them down better.  We must have had 100 pairs of shoes all over the house-- church shoes, tennis shoes, rain boots, soccer cleats, snow boots, flip flops, water shoes...  SO.  MANY.  SHOES.  But hopefully now I have them stored where I can find them when I need them, and I'll know to look there before I buy new ones!  Hopefully?  

Once I was finally done, I went to take a shower and Craig decided it was time to clean out Grandmere's desk.  We've had it in our entryway ever since we moved here, but he thought it might look good in the living room.  I just thought we'd move it, but Craig didn't want to move it with all the junk we've been storing there still inside.  So he went to work!  And ohmygoodness there was so much junk in there!  Checkbooks from ten years ago!  And so much random crud that I never knew what to do with so I just shoved it into the desk and forgot about it...  That is definitely NOT the way to stay organized, people!  So, yes, Craig worked very hard, and then we were able to move it to here:

And I think it looks wonderful there!

And in the meantime, we have all this space here now:

Which I think is just BEGGING for an entryway bench!  That way I'll have a place to sit while I put on my shoes AND we can store a few pairs of (my) shoes in it, too!  So I've been having fun looking at those on-line...

I really hate doing projects like these.  But I sure love how my house looks once they're done!