the essence

It continues

I cannot get this need to deep clean out of my system. I've constantly been moving furniture, taking off cushions to vacuum, purging LOTS of stuff - just from my craft/guest/multi-purpose room I now have 4 empty crates (previously holding books & fabric) & two empty mini plastic bins.

With limited time to craft as it is, I find that if things are a mess and unorganized then I don't really craft at all-it's just too difficult for me to be creative when I have to dig through bags of materials and am not able to find what I'm looking for right away.

I did get a solid computer desk from my mom (which someone gave to her) & I've set that up in the room in so that I can have an actual sewing table. I stacked my fabric on the bottom shelf in which cleared up one bin & half of my bookshelf. The other bins were cleared because we had a garage sale last weekend & got rid of a lot of books - I also took crafting items off of my bookshelves & put the books back up there. Some of my craft items are already in little wire baskets which I may hang on the wall.

I also foresee baby boy being in this room for awhile. This house came with very limited storage & not very large closets so there's no way his clothes will fit with the girls in their room so I'm trying to make room in this closet for his things.

The mini bins that I freed up were full of little toys that I've had for years...and years. I love kids and since I was a teenager I've kept toys in my room for the kids to play with when they came over. In my purging spree I realized that since I now have kids with their own toys I don't really need to keep around all of these little McDonald's toys. So, I cleaned those out. Some went in the trash, a few of the better ones (like mini My Little Ponies and Little Mermaid) I've set aside for the girls to have something "new" on our vacation this week, but most of them went into the prize bin for my piano students.

Oh, in other "exciting" news, I went to a couple neighborhood garage sales this past Saturday & I found a brand-new-in-the-box vacuum cleaner for $10!!! The best part is that it's the kind with water filtration so it really traps the dust. We had one when I was a kid & it was amazing! Granted, this one isn't nearly as nice as the one that we had but so far it really seems to work pretty well.