Day 8 of 60/300

This weekend is quite busy, and requires my house be in semi-order. On Saturday we are celebrating Charlie's 1st birthday with a small BBQ at the house. His birthday is on Friday but it makes more sense to celebrate it on Saturday. I can't believe my baby is turning 1, this year has flown by. So my house needs to be presentable for the party and since I've torn it apart at the moment it is anything but presentable. On Sunday I am having the first Yard Sale. I'll probably do an additional one at the end of the 60 days, but I have so many things I'm getting rid of I need to do one now. So I have to finish purging the major areas to prepare for that. My room and the Master Closet are nearly complete and today I organized the linen closet. I shall take a picture of that tomorrow. It used to be overflowing to the point where it was hard to shut the door, but I'm getting rid of so many linens that there is a completely empty shelf now. I wish I had remembered to take a photo prior to the purge.

So today I organized my room some, completely moved out most of the non-bedroom furniture that was residing in there, put back together most of my closet, cleaned out the linen closet, scrubbed the kids bathroom completely clean (it took me an hour of scrubbing in there to get it to my liking), and began purging the books. I have decided I'm also getting rid of my craft table/coupon table/sewing table and buying a desk instead. I think a desk would work better for me because it would have storage areas. I tried to go to Goodwill and Target today but both were closed. As we don't celebrate Easter this kind of surprised me. I hate shopping at Walmart and I wasn't desperate enough to try there so I'll make my runs tomorrow.

And finally - the crayon caddy is a hit.

The pencils are the "Handwriting Without Tears" pencils and there are so many so it takes up two pails. I may include a pair of scissors but I'm debating if I want to give the kids that much freedom. We don't do markers well in this house, the kids lose the tops so quickly we throw away so many.

This is their new art center. Prior to this it was one of the three drawer containers from Target and it was constantly falling apart, papers were spilling out, ect. It was a huge mess. The shelves were in my bedroom along with a lot of other office type things to hold all the homeschooling materials. As I'm purging my bedroom of non-bedroom furniture I figured I'd turn this shelving unit into their new art center.

The green basket holds their coloring books/work books. The three boxes are some of the stuff left over from the Pre-school homeschooling materials - such as puzzles, and lace cards. Missing in this picture is their "Handwriting Without Tears" wood pieces that are assembled to create most of the uppercase letters. It fits perfectly on the bottom shelf.

And finally - just because - this is a picture of a blanket bag I bought from the Bon Jovi Concert I went to! This held the blanket we bought Charlie since it was his first concert. When I was purging my closet I came across it and I don't want to throw it out but I have no use for it. My good friend Elaine, who is a beast with a sewing machine, is going to take on the challenge of turning it into a purse for me. It needs to be stiffened, and I'd love some more pockets on it. I can't wait to see how it turns out, and I promise to blog about it when it happens. I may have her write a post about how she did it!