Organization Part I

Lots of people sing the praises of Spring cleaning, but I love a good winter clean out fest.  If you ask C, he'll tell you that my cupboards, closets, bins, boxes, drawers, cubbies all runneth over and they require some dumping and donating.  I don't disagree but starting completing the task is daunting.
The first thing on my to do list was to tackle the toys.  We've got lots and lots of toys.  I actually don't think it's more than most of our friends but in absolute terms, it's alot.  In the last few weeks we have managed to purge about 60%+ of the toys we have.  Most of them have been donated; broken things and things with missing items were thrown out.  I was relentless with the editing and I'm now proud to report that we actually have EMPTY bins in our storage unit as a result.  Just in time to receive all the Christmas gifts (uggh).  Here is what I did:

• Make piles.  I made several piles: dump, donate/give to friends, keep, sell.  Our biggest pile was donate or give to friends.  These consisted of things that I had doubles of as a result of gifts (including lots of books).  Dump was reserved for broken items.  Sell was an empty pile.
• Be ruthless.  The only way to truly clean is to be decisive and ruthless.
• Don't clean while the kids are around.  C and I waited until the kids were asleep to make the assault on the toys.  Having them around only means things will be plucked out of piles to save and general messiness.
• Get rid of piles immediately.  Once you make the piles, you need to deal with them.  The donation and dump were piled into the car that night and the next morning to take to their destinations.  We reorganized the keep pile and put everything away before retiring for the evening.
• Use a labelmaker (or handwrite labels).  I love my labelmaker and used it judiciously while tackling this project.
• Rearrange.  To keep things interesting for the Boys and to keep things fresh, we moved things around.  The big train table and drawers is now in the part of our master bedroom adjacent to DD's nursery.  All trains and train related accessories have been sent upstairs.  The table and chairs set will go in its place after the holidays.

We're not quite done but we're close.  We need to buy another storage unit for all the new books we've amassed this past year. And, of course, this is not the type of project where you're ever done. It's an ongoing task when you have kids.  But at least we're in good shape to receive all the Christmas goodies  "Santa" will be bringing to us this year.