O is for Organizing--31 for 21:Day 22

I was hoping to do my original O post tonight, but again, I am pressed for time as I have been busy today cleaning and organizing. While I was busy working at house cleaning, my son was enjoying the day in Tallahassee at the FSU football game with his football team. What is wrong with this picture?

I am going to have to download the pictures of the organizing project I started today. You literally could not walk in our spare room. The floor was completely covered in boxes of every sort. Boxes on top of boxes! My good intentions a few years back were to make a spare guest room again. Of course that didn't happen. My mom had given me her mattresses that she had when she upgraded beds a few years back and they have been sitting against the wall since she gave them to me! The problem is this is not the first time we have had to do major reorganization in this room. It is a catchall!

We simply have way too much clutter and I am a hoarder! I hate letting go of stuff. Need a pen? I have a couple hundred? Pictures? A few thousand. Cards? A huge box of them. I have letters back from when I was a child! Now to give myself some credit, I have done some major purging through the years. I did go through and throw away all my old receipts from 5 years ago and every statement I have kept from the phone company,the electric company, etc. I have saved magazines before for years and decided to just put them out at a yard sale for free to get them gone. Good ones that don't go out of style like cooking magazines. I have sold several hundred books (hardback) for a dollar apiece at yard sales and about 3 years ago did my last final purge of all the hardbacks that were my absolute favorites (400 books) and I donated them all to the local library. I simply don't have the room for all this stuff. Now my dream home would have this awesome library with a huge window reading nook, but that story is for a another post. Not to mention that I have gone digital with the Kindle for the last year and frankly, I don't miss holding a book for a wonderful reading experience. Ok, back to the clutter....

I have some ideas about what I want to do with the room (on a tight budget of course) and I will share the before and afters with you all. One thing I am going to do is leave the bed leaning up against the wall for now and only put it up if we have any overnight guests. I went to Sam's today and bought 2 of those 6 shelves storage rack thingys. Kiley put them together for me and I am going to use them to hold all sorts of bins and boxes. This gets everything off the floor and I can see everything I need. I think I will ask my mom to sew some panels to place over them to cover everything up until I can buy all the bins I want. I am already liking how it is looking as I have everything off the floor now and on the shelves. (that's what i have been doing all evening--tackling all the junk!) Now for the hardest part. My biggest project to tackle from this room is two huge boxes filled to the brim with all sorts of papers in them. Down syndrome stuff, medical bills, recipes, photos, journaling notes, old bills, brochures, work junk, school stuff from the kids, etc. You name it I have it!

So, I am calling it a night and I hope to get a few hours of free time tomorrow to catch up on some more blogs from the blog hop yesterday and to share my original O post.