Mama-on-days: Taming the laundry room clutter….and something weird my husband put up on the wall.

This probably would’ve been a pretty awesome blog post-if I’d remembered to take some before pictures.  I thought I did-but iPhoto is telling me that I didn’t.

A great thing about company is that it forces you to get your house in order.  Cleaning is one of those things that comes last on my priority list.  I have friends who post status updates about how often they clean or how great it feels to do laundry.  Do they not know how great it feels to sit on the porch with a glass of wine or pop a bag of popcorn and sit down to watch a great movie?  

My mother in law is coming to visit.  I like her and we generally get along well.  Her last visit was 2 years ago.  I was in the middle of changing jobs after working at the same job for 13 years.  I was stressed out and working 12 hour days trying to get everything accomplished.  I thought I would just let her take care of the meals and the cleaning (since she seemed to like those things).  Bad decision. So for this trip-I am making sure that the house is cleaned and organized, that I have a few meals up my sleeves and a plan for our weekends.

My challenge for this week was to straighten up the laundry/junk room.  We have plastic boxes filled with my husbands junk and my precious belongings.  I have 4 bins filled with hand-me-downs for when the Biscuit is older and 8 bins filled with his old clothes in case we are lucky enough to have another.  I have a plastic bin filled with my old undergraduate and graduate text books and notebooks filled with notes and old blue books (test examination books.)  I graduated in 98.  It’s time to let them go.  But it’s progress, since last year, they were still in my file cabinets and on my bookshelf.  I also labeled a box called cassettes.  My husband has three plastic containers filled with old cables.  If there is apocaplyse and we go back to dot matrix printers. Come to my house for your connections!  Do you have all of your old textbooks and class notes?  When did you get rid of them?

I made three piles

• For Sale: (Craigslist and childrens consignment) 
• Donate: (Goodwill-with resulting speech therapy game purchases.)
• Trash:  (lots and lots of it.)  

I ended up with 2 car loads carted out plus several garbage bags full of stuff.  I made about 150.00 between Craigslist and the consignment store.

My laundry room is 10x better than it was-but it is still a gross Laundry room.

Only in my universe is this the REVEAL photo.

You know you’re a speechie when you label your own boxes.  I’m going to take the next two Mondays off since my mother in law is in town-but I have to show you our guest bedroom.  My husband said he would clean it up for her.  Here’s what it was like tonight:

Happy Back to School everyone!!!