House Update

It's been a crazy week for me (as I'm sure it has been for everyone)! I took this week off with the intention of focusing my attention on the house as much as possible. I took the first couple of days (last weekend) to myself. I relaxed, p-j-j'ed, and read a lot. I got dishes and laundry done too but those are every day maintenance chores so sometimes I feel like they don't count. I was home alone with the kids on Monday so I didn't get a lot done, just some basic around the house stuff. I did get the larger dresser moved into the kids' room and the clothes transferred though. I still need to move the smaller dresser out and into the spare room to be used for fabric storage though.

Tuesday, my mother in law came over and actually took the kids out for several hours (woo whoo!!!) so I took advantage. A big goal this week was rotating the too small kids clothes out and next size up in. I started with Rachel's last weekend so I had a head start. I separated Ethan's 4T's out to see how much I had that would still fit. We had a decent amount but I kept a few 4T items in the rotation until I can go shopping. I also ended up getting a bunch of hand-me-downs from a friend after doing Rachel's clothes so I needed to add those in, pair down as necessary and go through the time-to-leaves. I have a friend who just had a baby boy, one who has a girl a few months behind Rachel and another who has a boy about Rachel's age. So I had several people lined up to give stuff to thankfully (it makes it so much easier to give it away). That said, I've been reading the Outlander series and started watching the TV show when it came out on DVD. They very evilly separated the season so I got to watch the first couple discs then had to wait a couple months for the next set. I finally got my hands on volume 2 of the season 1 on DVD but I can't watch it around the kids. So when I had an afternoon to myself, I decided going through kids clothes was totally something I could do in the living watching Outlander. I got the rest of the 2T's on hangers and organized, got the 3Ts I have already (there's a tote waiting for me at a friend's house too) on hangers and stored in the spare closet, packed up the girl clothes for my 1 friend and the boy clothes for the other 2 friends (depending on size). I felt very productive.

Wednesday was more about prepping for Thanksgiving. I made an apple pie, pumpkin pie and cinnamon ice cream. And some laundry was done because like I said, never ending chore.

Thursday, of course, was Thanksgiving so that was my day off with my family. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Today (Friday) was my big push. I had a list of stuff I wanted to accomplish this week and I realized I had only 3 days left. My goal for those 3 days was to finish the laundry, clean the kitchen and bathrooms really well, go through clutter piles in the master bedroom and spare room and either pack up to give away or find a permanent home for the items, get through all the Thanksgiving dishes I put off until today, take pictures of the give-away/sell baby items so I could disassemble and pack them away to repurpose the room, set up the new bookshelves we ordered last weekend (that arrived 2 days early!!!), and finally take stuff to the various drop off locations to get it out.

So far, I'm basically caught up on dishes and laundry (I need to do the dinner dishes from tonight and 2 more loads of laundry). I went through several piles of clutter and cleaned out a couple small bags of trash, consolidated some piles, more than doubled the give away pile, and got things organized into new piles for easy put away once I have final homes established. I organized the closet in the master bedroom and Charlie helped take down the baby furniture and store it all in the attic. I did about 5 loads of laundry and got them all put away! It doesn't sound like a lot but I was busy all day going through stuff.

Tomorrow, the plan is to tackle the linen closet because it's now bursting out of the seams and needs to be organized to store more stuff in it (and to be more efficient). I want to move the small dresser into the spare room and rearrange the clutter so we can move the "home office" (desk, file drawer and computer) upstairs. I want to set up my vanity area in the master bedroom. Ideally, I will drop stuff off at the thrift store tomorrow and get some shopping done. I want to hit up some sales for new clothes for Ethan and maybe some Christmas gifts for the family. If I have time, I want to crank out the cleaning too because who wants to do that the day before they go back to work?

Sunday, it would be awesome if we're able to get the bookshelves assembled. Then I'll be able to unpack several boxes of books and start figuring out which ones I'm willing to get rid of. Now that I have better book storage, it's easier to say I only have so much shelf space and you don't fit and aren't important enough to me to keep so you can go. And since I work in a library, it's really easy to just take small piles of books with me to work and get them out of the house. That's the plan so far. We'll see how it all plays out tomorrow and Sunday. Keep you posted!