Crafty Clutter

On Sunday Ryan and I drove to Trenton to pick up our two free dressers. I didn’t take pictures, because I plan on doing Before/After pictures this weekend when we clean them up and give them a quick coat of paint. I’m also thinking of giving the shelf in Lem’s room a quick coat of paint, since I didn’t like how it turned out before, and will post a picture of it as well.

So this week’s Decluttering/Decorating “To Do”:

-Empty change table
-Move change table into laundry room
-Fill change table with cloth diapers
-Buy garbage pail for wetbag
-Buy spraypaint for dressers
-Clean dressers
-Paint dressers
-Take down shelf
-Paint shelf
-Put shelf back up
-Load Lia Marie’s dresser with her clothes
-List and sell even more things on kijiji.ca

Let’s see how much we can get done!

I see that the pictures from my last post have left my blog commenters speechless. Really I don’t blame you… they’re pretty bad.

I woke up this morning to an email from a lady in Trenton (about 40 minutes from our house) that wants to give me two white dressers in good condition for FREE! I love, love, love kijiji. I had posted an ad saying that I wanted a dresser for my daughter’s room but was looking for a very reasonably priced one. Now I get a dresser for BOTH kids’ rooms, not needing repairs or paint, for FREE. It’s a thankful day!

This means that I can start sorting clothes into dressers and washing baby clothes!

It was a very busy weekend at our house. Especially on Sunday!

Ryan and Lem spent two hours outside on Sunday morning, pulling up tomato plants, and all of the rest of our garden. We wanted to make sure that all of the dead plants were pulled up before it snows.

Here are a couple of cute pictures of them with their wheelbarrow. Isn’t Lem such a cute little Daddy’s helper?

While they were outside I worked on cleaning up the office so that we can be ready to renovate and paint it in the New Year. It is not finished, it’s really not even close to being finished… but HUGE progress was made, and I will share the before pictures, even though they are really, really embarassing.

The before pictures always remind me of the “Hoarders” documentary on TV. Except obviously we do not hoard rotten food and garbage…. the piles of stuff are still incredible and a force to be reckoned with.

So here they are.

So as soon as I finish the office, I’ll post “after” pictures. I imagine it won’t be too much longer… it really was some major progress that was made in there on Sunday, just not finished yet, so there’s no point in posting pictures of my beautiful room when it’s not done!

Last year was Lemmie’s first Christmas, and our first year as a matching pajama family. I made matching pajama pants for Lem, her Cabbage Patch doll, Ryan, and myself. The tradition that we have started has us opening one gift Christmas Eve (the pajamas that I make), sleeping in the pajamas, and waking up and opening gifts the next morning in the same pajamas.

Among many other things that have gotten accomplished this weekend, I finished nightgowns for Lemmie and her Cabbage Patch Doll. I’ll be working on pajama pants for Ryan and I next weekend while he is home and I can measure him regularly to be sure that they fit properly.

I’ll be sure to post pictures of us all in our Christmas pajamas shortly after Christmas, but I wanted to post pictures of the finished nightgowns here. There are some shadows on the picture, but you can get a pretty good idea of how they look:

Yesterday was a big day for us in Craftyclutterville.

We (well, really Ryan) let go of Joe. Actually, we let go of many, many Joes. G.I. Joes.

We got a price for them which was above what Ryan figured that they would go for… that he was happy about.

When the man came to pick them up I called him fuming “HE WAS A COLLECTOR!” I said. Ryan was totally a voice of reason (which when it comes to decluttering doesn’t happen very often). He told me “But we didn’t have to seperate accessories, look up the names of all of them, scrub them with a toothbrush, and list them individually for sale”. The amount of time that we would have had to put into them in order to sell them that way would not have been worth the increased price for us. We just have too many other priorities right now.

Instead, we’ll have to bask in having a major project scratched off of the “To Do List”, and regaining the space.

So Long, Joe!

Every day this week I have left with a grocery bag full of things that we are either giving away or selling on kijiji. There is still a lot of things that need to be removed from the house (it doesn’t look like we’ve made a dent in most of the piles in the basement).

I list and relist at least three things a day. I’m meeting some interesting characters who are out bargain hunting… glad to meet them at my work instead of my home in some cases.

So there’s not a huge lot to update. Once we get a few more bunches of things out, maybe I can take some pictures of some open space!

I have to say that it’s amusing that this blog (and our progress) has seemed to have taken a certain turn as of late.

Most people think “In the New Year, I’m going to get organized”, instead we are racing against the clock. We want to have things cleared out and beautiful before 2010! There were a few months in there where very little progress got done towards doing this, but the end of a pregnancy will renew committment like you wouldn’t imagine, lol.

So instead of a New Year’s Resolution we’re having a New Year’s Race!

I was talking to a friend the other day about how much I would love for someone to just drive up to my house, walk through, and take away the furniture and items that I wasn’t using anymore and cut me a cheque.

Well since that’s not going to happen, I have had to work on posting things little by little on www.kijiji.ca (local online classifieds). I have had pretty good luck with this so far, as mentioned in previous entries.

In the past week I have sold:
5 diapers for $60
Lem’s Christmas dress from last year for $20
Sleeper for $3

And I’ve listed a lot of other things and had interest in them. I am working on arranging pick up times for some people, and some have requested more pictures, etc.

If I can keep this up, we might actually find the space for this baby on the way!

So while we’re still nowhere near where we want to be as far as cleaning, organizing, and decluttering, the truth of the matter is that we’ve made a fair amount of progress this past month.

We spent some more time in the basement, sorted a lot of stuff into junk and recycling piles, and have been working at selling items on the local online classifieds. I’ve had a fair amount of success with that.

I think that the most challenging part of decluttering for me is letting things go without people purchasing them. I am tempted to list even the cheapest things online (that no one will pay for) just in case I can recoop some of the costs of it… cleaning and decluttering would be a lot easier if I just allowed the stuff to get out of my space, and sent it on it’s way to a merrier home where it can clutter up someone else’s space.

I did it though, this month. I let go of two large grocery bags of movies that we bought for cheaper than a movie rental, watched, and didn’t overly love or wouldn’t watch again. The point is… when we bought them we knew that they weren’t going to be major blockbusters. We bought them because it was cheaper to buy them than rent a movie… we figured if we watched them once we’d have gotten our money’s worth… so WHY DID I LIST THEM ON THE CLASSIFIEDS 15 different times before realizing I could just give them away???

Small, slow progress, right?

The night that we found out that we were having a baby boy, we started throwing around ideas for a nursery. Should we have a zoo theme? A sports theme? A farm theme? All good choices, but nothing was *really* sticking out at us the way that we wanted it to.

As we chatted on the phone during one of Ryan’s breaks at work he said “We should have a pirate theme! Y’arrr!”.

Brilliant.

Just brilliant.

How fun is a pirate room for a little boy? And so as soon as we had a theme, we started in on ideas. What goes with pirates? Parrots! Patches! Skulls and crossbones! Flags! Maps! Ships! Treasure! The list goes on and on and there are SO many ways to make this pirate room the coolest baby nursery on the planet.

The first thing that I did, being me, was google ideas for a pirate room.

So many cool ideas:

Wouldn’t a cool pirate ship kite make a great “mobile” for above the crib?

An unfinished boat steering wheel from Michael’s and a coat of stain would look awesome up on the wall.

Of course I sew, and so my first thought was to find fabrics for different projects. There are quite a few really cool pirate fabrics out there… but with shipping to Canada coming in at $10-$15, I have to be careful who I am buying from and how much.

I did purchase this material for pirate nursery curtains for a very reasonable price including fabric. I bought it from http://cutemonkey.etsy.com . Her shipping was very reasonable, and she did also have some really cute monkey pirate fabric, but I just didn’t want to spend TOO much on fabric right now.

I also went on a small ebay spree for some pre-cut squares for both the baby’s and Lemmie’s quilts. Here is the cute fabric that I got for the baby’s quilt:

We have SO MANY other ideas, but I think that we should start with this and go from there.

Besides, I have a backlog of projects that need to be finished and sent out before I can get TOO involved in redoing kid’s rooms.

Stay tuned for a similar update on Lem’s room (which will hopefully by done by the end of November!).