60/300 Day 1!

Today began my kickoff of my personal Spring Challenge - my 60/300 challenge. As much as I try to keep my home as clean and neat as possible it is quite challenging with 4 young ones running around and a very sweet, caring - but messy - husband to clean up after. One day of taking it easy can put me behind by a week. I need to get my home more organized so hopefully I won't need to spend as long on cleaning every day. I'm not doing any ordinary cleaning. Every corner of my home will be transformed. I figure it will take me roughly 2 months to completely go through every single item in my home, catalog what we keep and sell, donate, or throw away the rest. At first I was planning on only spending $200 but after my first trip to Target I knew that wasn't going to be enough. $300 is still pretty conservative, but I don't mind a challenge.

Day 1 began with a trip to Target. I bought 2 binders, one for my household binder and one for

the household recipe binder. I also bought colored computer paper, colored cardstock, scrapbook paper, and a new label maker (!!!). My total was $53. I printed out some of the household binder sheets and completed my cover page (almost). All I need it a picture of the family to put on it!

I also printed up The Mizzell Family Rules, The Mizzell Morning Schedule, and The Mizzell Playroom Rules. I got this idea from my friend Miranda's Blog.

I placed them in frames and they are now hanging in our dining room, and playroom. Anthony is already repeating the rules to us verbatim!

Today I decided to shoot for purging the garage. It will probably take me a week or so to finish it. The garage is in major need of TLC. With Nebraska weather there isn't many days where we can actually spend much time in it, and it's become a catch all for every. single. thing. we. own. I'm hoping to actually get rid of quite a bit in there, and have the rest neatly placed in bins/boxes/containers. And with my new, lovely, label maker everything will be labeled!

My garage started out looking something like this: (these were taken on the phone, I'm sorry for the poor quality)

These are my shelves for food. At first one of them was being used for craft items, and my some of my sewing supplies. The other was semi organized but not the way I like it.

This is the back "catch all" storage area. Literally, this is where we dump everything. It drives me absolutely crazy. The other picture is the side of the garage where the rest of my sewing stuff is, the tools, the gift wrap/bags area, and our old couch that we are desperately trying to give away.

This is a way back view of the "food" side of the garage with our deep freezer in the middle. The other picture is another view of the back of the garage. I got all those 2 liters on sale for around .60 a bottle. Stocking up for the summer BBQ's!

And this is after my progress from today. Still a ways to go, but getting better. I cleared off most of the black and white shelves, and the bottom of my sewing shelf to make room for the craft items.

I also took inventory of the food shelves in the garage!

I organized the food shelves and labeled them.

I began the pile of things to throw away, donate, or sell.

The back of the garage is looking a lot better, but still not there.

A better shot of the white and black shelves.

Tomorrow I'll continue on with the garage and begin the Master closet - another awful area of the house as I left it to my husband to keep clean....

59 Days left

$247 left.