Tidy Up Tuesday

Okay, so I know it's actually Thursday. I'm still figuring out how to do a day-of-the-week themed post... I think that if I'm going to do a Tidy Up Tuesday post each week, I should actually write it on Monday evening so I can post it on Tuesday morning... anyway, it's here now. Deal with it.

My goal for my first SAHM Summer is to systematically go through our entire house to clean and organize it. I hope that if I can do this over the summer, the school year will go a little better.

I'm getting a jump on the project because I need things to be organized now. I started with one of the areas that's a little more difficult for me. One of the kitchen cabinets. It's the one where we store all the baby bottles and other baby equipment. This one was a little challenging for me because the baby isn't a baby anymore, and it was time to get rid of his baby stuff. But getting rid of the baby stuff means that it's real and my baby really isn't a baby anymore.

This is what it looked like before:
That white box was full of bottles, nipples and collars, but many of them fell on my head in an avalanche when I opened the door.

I began by removing everything from the bottom shelf, and this was all the stuff I found:

And this was some of the stuff I threw out:

Before you recyclers out there get upset, let me clarify. I identified two crates like this full of stuff that could no longer live in that cabinet. Much of it went into the sand table and toy boxes for the boys to play with. A lot of it did get thrown in the trash because it had been saved from Tyson six years ago and was damaged. Many of the bowls had been microwaved to within an inch of their lives. And yes, anything that could be put into the recycle bin was put there.

Once the crate was empty, I used it to corral all of Riley's dishes. Is it just me, or are the baby bowls, cups, plates, etc. the worst things to try & store? They're all funny shapes and sizes and nothing really stacks together very well.

And here's how it looked when I was done. No more avalanches of plasticware. No more throwing things on top of the pile and slamming the door shut before it all cascades out onto my head.
There are a few bottles left. Those are what I use to send Riley's whole milk to school each day (the school uses 2%, but his Dr. wants him on whole). I also find that they're really useful for storing other things as well.

I'm not sure what I'm going to work on next. There are other kitchen cabinets to be organized & purged, so I'll probably just keep going on that. I think it would be best to just stick with a room until it's completely done before moving on to the next room.

This project will also include redecorating Ty's room, as well as decorating our bedroom and Riley's room. (I say "decorate" those last two rooms because the truth is that, despite living in this house for 8 years, I've never gotten around to doing anything to most of its rooms.) But I'll go more into that later.