Cleanin' Out the House

For those of you who are not regulars at the Beaber house, this is our playroom. And it almost never looks like this. I made the epic mistake of not taking a 'before' photo. I'm sorry, I'm still new at this blogging stuff. It hasn't quite become second nature to me to photograph all the befores, middles, and afters of our life. I really should have taken a before shot though. You would have been amazed, astounded, nay even flabbergasted at the transformation. A brief description would be, you couldn't see the floor for all the toys scattered across it. There would have been no walking 2 steps into the room with out impaling your foot on some ridiculously sharp toy that is supposedly child safe. There was no separation of toys, no distinction between the masses. In fact I think the remote control trains were giving free rides to the hex bugs while we were eating dinner. In exchange the hex bug battle ground served as a support system for the second story of the train track. All while the match box cars were having drag races along the perimeter of the track.  Somehow, no one ever knows exactly how, the dress up clothes once again vomited out of their bucket to cloak the entire room in mystery.  The stuffed and mounted musky was giving a bear a piggy back ride. It was complete and total chaos

Saturday morning, after a nice leisurely breakfast, I roped everyone into helping purge the playroom. I had been wanting to do this since Christmas. If you have children you know how Christmas is a mixed blessing when it comes to new toys. We definitely needed to get rid of some of the old to make room for the new. When I clean the playroom, we dump absolutely every bucket in there upside down. This does make for a larger mess initially but it is necessary in order to find all the random pieces that have been put away in the wrong bucket when the boys were in charge of cleaning up on their own. It always amazes me how in our pretty organized system, where there is a container of some kind for every category of toy we own, the bullets for the nerf guns can end up in the play mobil and the dress up clothes can be found in the train set. I guess maybe the kids aren't quite as good at matching as I thought. Except, they are. They just don't want to. My absolute favorite though, is when they have been told to clean the playroom, and they take all the stuff they aren't quite sure of and make piles in the corners. As if I'm not going to notice that. Silly kids.

After about 2 1/2 hours we have the beautiful results that you see here. With everyone pitching in, including Troy and our friend Alexa, it actually went much more smoothly than when it's just me and the boys. Meaning, I did a lot less yelling. I actually think doing a major clean out and reorganize like this is fun. I LOVE the results. It feels so satisfying.

Here's what we pulled out of the room. Can you believe there was an entire bag of garbage in there? Not including the 4 cardboard boxes we broke down. Where did it all come from? It's supposed to be just toys up there! We also found 2 garbage bags worth of toys we will be giving away to someone else who will appreciate and enjoy them. We split up the match box cars to go to the grandparents and emptied out 2 bins! Yay! Now my goal is to not fill them back up. I also got the boys to clean up their bedroom floor and the school room floor so that the entire upstairs could be vacuumed. Unfortunately that doesn't happen as often as it should. So satisfying. And the best part is - it is still this clean today, even after having the company of 3 other kids, because the boys have cleaned up after themselves so spectacularly. Probably because they know mommy would blow a gasket if I walked upstairs and found it a mess. They know they need to wait at least 3 or 4 days before the threat of that happening wears off.
Don't worry, that's not all we did this weekend. Although I don't have any pictures because I didn't want to take my camera out in the cold and I don't own one of those fancy smart phones. We spent the rest of Saturday sledding at SBR and playing with friends. Then on Sunday after church, we had small group here and ended the evening with an epic game of freeze tag. It was a lot of fun.
I hope this inspires you to purge somethings at your house. I know this is just the beginning of my purge-fest.
But please, don't expect me to take pictures of it all.