I wish I took pictures

I made a deal with my youngest boy this weekend... if he could help with some of MY chores, I would clean his room. After short negotiations as to what chores he'd have to do, he went for it.

So I spent a good part of Sunday tearing into the plethora of bins and containers in his room. It looked waaaaaay worse before it started looking better, but now there is some logic to the containers (all the playmobil in one place, hotwheels in another, for example).

Thanks to all the practice I've had in my own spaces lately, I had great success consolidating and streamlining his storage bins! I put SIX high quality empty bins in the crawlspace (I know I should just donate them, but I will give them some time to prove useless before that). There was a small amount of trash (toy packages) and only a small amount of damaged toys, so I didn't really remove a whole lot of volume. It was just the miss-filed items that were taking up so much extra space. And that accident has been fixed now.

He came home from an outing with dad to a better looking and better functioning space. Oh ya and it was cleaner too. With everything torn out, I could vacuum and dust in the chronically blocked corners... small mountains of dust and pet hair lurked there (ewwww). With less bins now, theoretically it should be easier to clean these corners more often. It's now Wednesday and it's still very nice in there. :)

In other news: 2 weeks ago I gave 4 very large, quality, hinged plastic bins to my sister to help her rotate toys in her kids' playroom.... she has seen my decluttering successes and thought she'd try cutting down the immediate choices for her kids so they could find it easier to put things away and easier to find something to play with. By rotating the toys, old will be new again in a few months, and clean up time should go faster.

It's funny how there is a certain point where too much choice is annoying instead of fun - that's where her playroom had gone to. Nobody wanted to play in there. Now that 4 large totes worth are out of sight, and several more bags were donated or tossed, and even a large piece of furniture was removed, her kids suddenly love their playroom again!

No I didn't pest my sister to do it, she just saw with her own eyes that I have been happier with less, and recognized that it could solve her playroom frustrations to have less too. And I just happened to have a bunch of empty bins (!)