Sunday BigDaddyFish and I spent the day cleaning our bedroom. This may not sound like much, but for us this was a massive undertaking, since it really hadn't been done since Sunny was born. Really. She nursed for 2 years, a lot, and since I have clutter issues anyway, I found it really difficult to summon the energy and strength required to do it, so I didn't. So why now?
Because Monday morning contractors were coming to rip out our master bathroom and start over. Okay, so not that much, but we are doing a major overhaul of said bathroom, complete with brand spanking new shower, drywall work, ductwork, and paint.
So, since my family and close friends can see me be a slob but contractors can't, some major work had to be done. My room was piled high with huge mounds of clothes that don't fit any of our kids right now, but should sometime in the future, as well as a large number of rubbermaid tubs, bins, buckets, and other containers full of toys from the kids' rooms. BDF spent a lot of time going through the toys with the kids, deciding what to keep, what to pack away for the baby, and what to sell at a yard sale/donate to charity. The kids worked hard at it, fully understanding that we have to downsize so that we have a reasonable chance of selling our house when we find a new one we can actually afford (did I mention that we need a bigger house? Before the new baby turns one? Because the bedrooms here are too small? And we live in DC, which means we need $150K more than we have to do it?). RT is excited to sell her old toys and wants to donate the proceeds to Children's Hospital. She learned at CCD this past year that at Children's they treat EVERYONE, even kids whose families can't pay, and she's really stuck on this now. She saves a portion of her allowance to donate, too. It has become her pet charity, and I'm really pleased that at 6 1/2 she's found a cause that means something to her.
TheBoy just wants to have money to buy more toys for the new house. Since he really has the most toys, I'm okay with this for now, since it motivates him to get rid of stuff. We'll deal with charity soon enough (fact is, we donate a lot to charity every year, and I "encourage" the kids to participate by weeding out toys before every birthday and Christmas to "make room for new toys" and we donate all of those).
Sunny's easy, we just helped her pick the ones she played with the most, saved half of the rest for her baby brother, and put the others aside for the yard sale. We do call her Sunny for a reason.
We packed up a huge bucket and two large boxes of outgrown girl clothes to take to my cousin, who is having a baby girl in September, and I will be taking those to her next week. We then organized the rest of the clothes into the biggest rubbermaid bins we could find (I think they are 35 gallon or something, rather huge, I can't lift them when they are full) into categories: Too Big for RT, Too Small for TheBoy, and Too Small for RT but Too Big for Sunny, which we have actually 6 or so bins of that size for, since my SIL gave me all that her girls have outgrown. They are all full, complete with lids, and stacked in my loft. At least they are out of my bedroom.
Then there was much dusting and sorting and throwing out of junk, and packing away of books, books, books, since I am a voracious reader. I have a weakness for the $.01 used books on amazon, so I have a humongous library, mostly paperback mysteries. These were simply stacked along the walls when I ran out of shelf space. I sorted some for the yard sale, and the rest just boxed up for the inevitable storage place we will need to rent prior to putting our house on the market.
I also sorted out all of RT's winter clothes and put them in see-thru bins under her bed, to free up 2 drawers for Sunny. Sunny is now officially moved into what is now the girls' room.
I now have about 50 loads of laundry to do, but my room hasn't been this clean maybe ever, and the kids rooms are all clean/organized, and I'm getting a "new" bathroom in a beautiful shade of moss green that will be fabulous.
I'm probably not going to want to leave. But unless I want my son, who doesn't even have a name, much less been born, to sleep in my room until college, we need to go.
It will be hard to say good bye.
I just hope I can maintain the cleanliness long enough to sell it.
Next up: The Renovation, and Life from the Bermuda Triangle
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