Get Organized with Spring Cleaning

Thrifty Thinking:

Organization Saves Time, Saves Money

Have you started your spring cleaning yet?  The easier it is for you to access the items in your house, the more likely you are to spend less because you will know what you have or don’t have.  Plus, you’ll tend to eat at home more, which is also a HUGE money saver.

I do not spring clean, per say, every year, but the last two years I’ve really gone for it.  While I was cleaning this weekend, I found I had bought extra disposable plates I didn’t need, I found popsicle molds, I found lots of Lysol Wipes I never use, and LOTS, LOTS more.  Now we can use these items later, but I wouldn’t have even purchased some of these items if I would have known I had them.

 

The Coloring Boxes Before

I got really tired of looking at this big old unorganized pile.  This is where our kids go for all of their coloring needs.  The need to organize this gave me the perfect opportunity to have my girls come along side of me and sift through all of these papers and coloring books to learn the great art of organization.

 

The Coloring Boxes During

Sometimes you have to destroy things before order comes.  It took about 45 minutes, but I had some good time with my girls as we put pencils, stickers, and papers together.  Ellie and I sharpened all of the pencils and colored pencils so they are ready to go! She was such a BIG help!! 

The Coloring Boxes After

Looking at this organized pile helps me to breath a sigh of relief.  Ahh….

If you are overwhelmed thinking about going through every nook and cranny of your house, break it down, break it down, break it down.  Don’t look at the whole house.  Take ONE drawer at a time.  Tell yourself you are only going to work for 10 minutes on one drawer a day.  You will be surprised how far you can get!  It can get quite addicting!

You can pick the easiest room, cabinet, area, or drawer.  The laundry room wasn’t too bad, so it was a good place to tackle.

Sometimes it’s hard to get motivated if you are the only one at it.  I invite you to invite a friend over to help you.  It’s a great way to get to know someone more, when you are mindlessly organizing (or at least some of it is mindless).  Or invite yourself over to help someone and at the same time get to know them better!  It’s so fun to learn different things about others.  I also love gaining useful household tidbits and good tidbits of life in general.

Last year during spring break my husband was off to Europe with a great group of kids for two entire weeks.  I secretly was excited for him to get away so I could get a whole bunch of things done around the house.  I couldn’t even sleep the first couple of days because I was so excited to get things done!  Our church family came along side of me and amazingly blessed our family with different kinds of projects that they helped me tackle like putting my new (at the time) jogger

stroller together, installing a water heater, mowing our lawn, breaking down our crib and replacing it with a toddler bed, and the list goes on.   I basically did none of that kind of work, but I did organize our drawers.  I gutted the utensil drawer for the first time in our marriage, “installing” a utensil holder.  Can you see it buried in there?   Anyway, I couldn’t wait for JSarr to come home and show him all of these awesome things that were accomplished.

Well, the organization of my utensil drawer lasted for about 6 months, which I thought was pretty good, and then it slowly morphed into a mass of chaos again.  This weekend the Lord allowed me

10 minutes between roasting some veggies, and I was able to emerge with this arrangement.  Much better (even if you can’t tell, I know:)!

As you are organizing, it is a great time to think ahead.  While we were going through the different compartments of the home, I had Jonathan get out a big plastic box so I could put items in there to garage sale that we don’t need or use anymore.

In our China hutch drawer I used old Rubbermaid and Tupperware that I wanted to get rid of to organize.  We are moving more toward all-glass for our cooking.  The plasticware was in my garage sale box, and I thought that I would reuse these containers for organizing.  Now the kids’ stickers are stored in there.  Ah, I can, again, breathe clearer now.

It’s probably not too exciting to see a whole bunch of pictures of the different drawers in my house.  I have lots more, but I’ll only share a few more.

So what do you think?  Is it time for a little spring cleaning around your home?  Having lots of stuff can just be plain stressful!  When you are managing multiple things, schedules, people, menus, budgets, etc., the more clutter you have the more out-of-control the home can feel, and in turn, the more out of control you can feel.  We still have stuff, but I want less stuff.

I have now gone through most of our food in our pantry areas and given away what I think we won’t use anymore.  I haven’t yet gone after the freezers aggressively, but we are eating way more out of them now, trying to make room for good food like frozen fruits for smoothies.

We still have more to go through, as I have the kids’ clothing drawers to tackle.  For some reason that is the most daunting task to me, so of course, I am saving it for last.  At least they are a little bit older now (2 1/2, 5 and almost 7) and can help a bit.  The problem is they want to keep EVERYTHING, ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING!  Organizing is a good time to teach the kids that they need to let go of things at times.

Are you going to spring clean?  We would love to hear from you!  Feel free to comment.  Get free e-mail updates by subscribing here.  Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.