No Hoarding Here

Have you ever watched the show Hoarding: Buried Alive on TLC?  Mark is grossly obsessed with watching this show.  It draws him to watch it in a "so disgusted you can't keep your eyes off" kind of way.  Episode after episode he watches and at the end he states every time "I will never let you be a hoarder...".  We are actually FAR from being hoarders but this terrifies Mark so much that it gives him anxieties to think about "stuff" accumulating at the house.  If you really want to prank Mark you should tell him that I told you it was ok to store all of your belongings in our attic for awhile.  That absolutely drives him crazy!  :-)

He has been troubled for awhile now that the attic was accumulating things and was an absolute disaster, but it was MUCH too hot to even discuss going up to organize it.  Luckily, with October came a much needed break from the heat.  With the high for the weekend in the 70's, going up in the attic wasn't actually a death sentence.  So Mark and I planned this past weekend to do a complete organization of the house.  We went through the things in the attic, the guest closet, and under the sink.  We have been very fortunate to receive some hand-me-down boys clothes and toys from friends and family (some of which were originally passed down from Chase!! ha), but all of these things were thrown in boxes and bags and desperately needed to be sorted through.

In order to get started, our first trip was to Lowe's where we picked out what type of storage containers we wanted to purchase.  There were several options from cheap recycled plastic to expensive storage containers with wheels.  In the end we settled somewhere in between.  We wanted lids that would actually latch because nothing is worse than packing up a box and picking it up only to have the lid pop up and storage container dumping all over the floor.  After some deliberation we settled on a storage container by Hefty.  The two biggest draws to this container were the easy secure latch lids and the clear containers.  Although we were labeling all the containers it is much easier to be able to see exactly what it contains at first glance (especially if you are trying to get to something in the middle of the summer and it is stored in the attic, time is of the essence!) 

The first project we tackled was the guest closet.  We use this closet as a sort of catch all from the rest of the house.  We have blankets, pillows, Halloween costumes, several comforters, Mark's dress clothes, pictures frames and who else knows what packed into this small closet.

Unsure of exactly where to start, I began taking out items one by one starting with Halloween costumes.  I love dressing up and going to Halloween parties/ festivals so we have quite the little collection of costumes from the past several years.  Taking each one out brings me down memory lane…

Halloween 2008

Halloween 2006

After carefully removing all the Halloween costumes I took inventory of everything we had and then folded them into one of the Hefty containers we purchased.  I also threw in our Graduation caps and gowns since they may make great costumes in the future…maybe a judge or something?  Another advantage to the clear containers is that I was able to label the container and its contents from the inside to prevent the label from falling off or permanently writing on the container.  In the end I had an organized container of Halloween costumes and a nice size dent in the closet.   I also went through all the blankets and comforters we had collected in just the past 3 years (I may have a slight compulsion with changing our bedding if you note the picture of the closet above ;-)).  In the end 3 different comforters were donated to Goodwill and by this time I was starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  The only thing left was the small amount of craft supplies I had left over from decorating Eli’s nursery.  I had several rolls of ribbon, tape and clothespins that I didn’t want to fill up a desk drawer so I took this image I had found on Pinterest and came up with an easy organization method to hang in the closet.

 

With the removal of 3 comforters and all the Halloween costumes,there was tons of room in the bottom of the closet, so the workout equipment that had been holding a permanent spot in our living room for the past year finally found a home tucked away behind a closet door still easily accessible.

 

And there she blows…the finished closet.  You will notice Mark’s dress clothes are still stored in this closet.  This is because fur ball #1, Saydee, loves to climb up our clothes in our master closet in order to sleep in the top of the closet as shown here.  This was leaving Mark’s nice dress clothes with lots of little claw snags…so keeping them in this closet where the door is shut all the time is a much better  option.

With the closet finished, we turned to the attic.  We both dreaded what we would find up there since throughout the summer we had been throwing boxes up as fast as possible to prevent dying from heat exhaustion.  Mark took the venture to the attic and snapped some before pictures.  Behold the chaos…

 

Disaster right?  We have boxes of toys, twin bed mattress and box springs, boxes of college notebooks, softball coaching items, etc. strewn everywhere.  This was pretty much Mark’s baby…but I did climb up to the attic and sort through 3 containers of college notebooks, all of which I decided to toss.  I had been keeping them for over 3 years only because so much hard work had been put into those binders and I didn’t have the heart to throw them out yet.  That was until now…I realized I would never look at those notebooks again and there was no reason just keeping them around to collect dust, so out they went.  So Mark went to town organizing the attic into section and throwing out things he felt we didn’t need any more.  While he muscled out moving things around in the attic…I began to go through the hand-me-down clothes Eli had been given.

 

One by one I went through all of the clothes and sorted into piles by size.  Most of the clothes he received were actually pants from 12 months to 2T.  I sorted the pants and placed them inside another one of our clear Hefty containers.

 

And believe it or not, I actually had to start storing clothes that Eli has already outgrown…it is hard to believe that he has actually been here long enough to outgrow clothes!  I wasn’t quite able to fill an entire container with his outgrown clothes so I decided to keep this container in his room to finish filling as he outgrows some more of his little outfits.

 

 Mark had accumulated an entire truck load of items that either had to be thrown away or donated to Good Will so he was off to de-hoarding us while I stayed at home cleaning a very special walker Eli had received.  This car walker was actually Chase’s when he was Eli’s age and had been given to a family friend for her boys.  She returned the favor and gave it back to us for Eli.  It was in need of a lot of TLC but with about an hour of scrubbing it was in pretty good shape.

By the time Mark returned Eli was ready to try out his new toy.  This weekend he seems to have discovered he can yell and spent most of the weekend yelling like Tarzan.  It has been very funny to hear all the sounds he is now making.  This is just a tidbit of what we got to listen to all weekend while we busted our butts organizing and cleaning.

My last project I tackled while Mark continued going through the attic madness was the kitchen sink.  Another Pinterest find sparked this project for an under the sink makeover.  This is what our sink looked like before I tackled the project.

And this is the amount of grocery sacks that were actually squished under there.

 

 One of the fortunate finds of the day was the tension rod found in the attic.  I recycled this tension rod under the sink and with a little reorganization and encouragement from Eli, I was able to accomplish this:

Eli cheering me on

By the time all of my inside projects were complete, Mark had finished cleaning up the attic.  There are still a few things we want to do like purchasing shelves to put in the attic for all of our paint and such, but we will get around to that later.  Here is the finished attic pictures:

Whew, so that is how we spent our first weekend in October.  What about you, have you ever done a major organization/ clean up?  Does anyone else have a fear of hoarding like Mark or does anyone dare to admit they have a little hoarding habit?  We would love to hear your stories or better yet any organization advise!!!