This week, our task is cleaning the living room and office. I think these are the two smallest sections and I might be able to just do them all. So, on our list for the living room, we have…
- vacuuming the furniture
- shampooing the furniture
- replacing air filters
- dusting shelves and picture frames
- washing baskets because they can get dusty and grimy!
- Washing the curtains is one thing that I added to my list
And then in the office, we have…
- throwing out papers and sorting them
- organizing files
- going through desk drawers
- going through books
- going through crap supplies
You can download your own PDF checklist. So, who’s ready to jump in and do this?
Alright. Let’s start cleaning the living room and office here. We’ve got some toys to put away before we can start cleaning the furniture. We’re going to vacuum and hopefully shampoo at least one couch today. It’s been a while since I’ve gone through my craft supplies. So, I want to do a deep dive into that. I’m organizing Brian’s stuff and his desk drawers because it’s really hard for me to find stuff that I need that he has. And then the office cabinets, I’ve done them many times, but I think that they just need a little touch-up and I want to go through my papers.
And I just did my whole filing system not too long ago, but it’s always good to just take a minute to do a little refresher on it.
The main reason I need to watch these curtains that we just bought and put up a month ago; The dog peed on them. Ughhhhh.This is a great time to just wash all your throw pillows and throw blankets.
I realized I had quite a collection of baskets. They really are a weakness of mine!
In my office drawers, I use old boxes such as iPhone boxes and all kinds of little boxes to organize stuff because they’re really sturdy and they have straight sides, so it’s quite nice.
This is my box of papers that I need to take action on or file. Really, what I need to do is file things right away and not put them in here but since I knew I was going to be doing this video soon, I kind of let things pile up. In the next drawer are notebooks, other books and things that basically don’t fit anywhere else.
In the video, I’ll talk you through my process of going through my drawers and deciding what to keep and what to get rid of.
When you take the time to sort out the art supplies by category you can see how much of something you have. I realized we have a lot of paintbrushes, tons of pencils, and tons of colored pencils, which the boys don’t even really use so I’m trying to pair all of that down. And I couldn’t resist doing a little bit of rainbow organizing with the crayons!
I’m pulling out all of Brian’s textbooks and notebooks and stuff from college. It’s been many years – If you haven’t used it by this point, I’m pretty sure you’re not going to! Plus you can also sell textbooks.
I’m going to work on cutting down our cords and that kind of thing and hopefully sell off some of these old computers. We had six ethernet cables and lots of other duplicates, so I pared that down to just the chords that look kind of important.
And now I’m going to go through and try to do a big purge of our books because we just have a ton of them. A lot of them are books that people gave us that we are never going to read. There are other books we’re not really fans of anymore, so we can hopefully now just let those things go.
While the boys were watching a movie, I decided to go through my craft supplies as quickly as possible to try to consolidate things and rearrange a little bit better. And I’m sorry, the camera angle’s not the best but I was really trying to hurry. I didn’t realize how much space all the packaging was taking so when I took all my paints and art supplies out of their packaging, I really freed up a ton of room. When it comes to craft supplies, you have to decide which stuff you’re keeping for ‘aspirational you’ and what stuff you’re keeping for ‘actual you’, that you will use and not just dream about using someday.
That was a lot of decluttering! If you enjoyed watching the video on cleaning the living room and office, this is part three. So, you can watch part two and part one, and you can also download your own checklist. I’d love to see what you’re spring cleaning. You can definitely tag me on Instagram!
