Day 6 I was supposed to clean under the bed.

Cleaning under the bed was mostly easy.  I took all the junk out & put it in the holding basket, then put it all away.

Dusted under the bed, then slid the already tidy drawers back in.

 

Here’s where the cleaning bit gets messy. Day 7 was cleaning the shelving units at the end of my bedroom.

The problem with the shelves is that they are where all the extra stuff is stored: books & movies that have been borrowed but not yet returned (I borrow from a friend that I only see once every 3 or 4 months so it’s a big pile), videos & DVDs from other areas that have been taken out but not put back (mostly because they no longer have a home due to changes in living room furniture), paper goods that need to be filed but can’t because of sleeping David (the file cabinets live in his closet), all our old yearbooks because they can’t live in the moist garage anymore, etc.

 

So the dilemma is that there’s no longer storage for videos in the living room and my under the bed space is totally filled up.  I started going through there and clearing out movies I was pretty sure we’d never watch again or would be easily available through Netflix. I only managed to get rid of about 6 items. Then I moved on to the drawer of them in David’s room (the old TV stand is in there and used as Lego Building Territory, but we’d never cleared out the drawer and had meant to) and got rid of most of those.   I also dug through the one drawer in the media cabinet that has DVDs and sorted through those and got also got rid of all our cassette tapes, as we haven’t had a cassette player in years (edited to add: some tapes that had sentimental attachments stayed, such as mix tapes made by us or friends).

I still had too many movies to fit into the tiny drawers in the media cabinet.  So I pulled the old media shelves back in from the garage, rearranged a bit of furniture again to accommodate them, and put them back into place.  The rest of the videos and DVDs fit there nicely…with lots of room to spare.  I started thinking about that extra room and how what I thought I needed for the sheet music was shelves.  I ended up pulling out all the music, organizing it by instrument (piano, clarinet, flute, recorder, violin, small percussion), then by book series & level, composer, or genre, depending on the book.  Put all those on the bottom shelf and they fit perfectly.

So in the end I worked on days 6, 7, 16, & 17.  I still have some more work for day 16 – I’m going through and ripping CDs to mp3 that I never listen to because they can’t go on the iPhone as they currently stand – involving moving quite a few CDs into a “Discard if not used in 6 months” box.  But that I’ll leave for later in the month.

 

I’d hoped to get the rest of the shelves in my room cleared out, but the kids are coming home from their Nana & Pa’s house earlier this morning than I’d expected, so this is as far as I got, which is still so much better than it had been.