Crafty Clutter

We seem to have great weekends around here when Ryan is off. We deep cleaned the kitchen yesterday, and today we decorated for Christmas (except for the Christmas tree).

I also washed and dried all of the cloth diapers, and tried to treat our new prefold diapers (they’re not done yet). We put the knobs onto the dresser, and replaced the knobs in our end tables.

I meant to list some new things on kijiji, but I’ve been slowed down because of being off work the past week. I haven’t been able to have people pick stuff up from me. Ryan has been working a lot of overtime and so he hasn’t been able to do drop offs to people, either.

Tomorrow I will take some pictures of new things to list on kijiji, though, we have to clear out some more space for Alexander and Lemmie to play!

Last weekend, Ryan and I decided that we were going to work on refinishing the dressers that we got for FREE for Alexander and Lemmie’s rooms. We had purchased the wrong paint for the job, so it started with a trip to Walmart to get the right stuff.

Here is Alex’s dresser. This is actually after we had done quite a bit of peeling off stickers, etc. So it was actually in worse shape than it appears here:

I do have pictures of Ryan painting the dresser, which I will share when I do the completed dresser post. We have to purchase knobs for the dresser and then it’ll be all done. We’re thinking something brassy would fit in well with his pirate themed bedroom.

Here is the picture of Lem’s dresser. For now we have just cleaned it, which made it look a pretty white colour (without stickers) again. It is in her room and full of clothing, but we intend to put a flower on the front of it, as well as cards to tell her what goes into her drawers. She’s so independent that she’s becoming interested in dressing herself, and the picture cards will be a great help for that in the not so distant future. We just need to find some reasonably priced contact paper.

This is the before picture of her dresser. I’ll wait until the flower and picture cards are on hers before I do the “after” photo for her, as well.

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!