Spring Cleaning Saturday

Its that time of the year; time to go through your closets and say, "Why the heck do we have _____?" and "Huh, so that's where _____ went!" Time to break out the piles for Good Will, yard sale, and the trash. I love this time of year. Because of my crazy work schedule, the weekends are pretty much the only time that I can really get knee deep in clutter busting though, so why not make a blogtastic day out of it! Each Saturday (and probably Sunday) I'll post about our spring cleaning efforts and how we keep three people organized in an 800 sq. foot apartment.

Today's tasks - laundry, sorting my fabric stash, getting rid of old magazines, and continuing to collect things for the yard sale on May 7th.

Despite my love of clutter busting, I can be sort of a pack rat. Hence the ridiculous stack of magazines weighting down our coffee table. This picture is of HALF of the magazines we've somehow acquired. We used to have a subscription with Mag Hound, which was a really awesome program, but with nowhere to really recycle them on campus, it was too much to store. Maybe we'll rekindle our love with Mag Hound someday in the future.

I set out this morning to go through all of my magazines and rip out the stuff I wanted. Cool article about positive discipline tactics for toddlers? *rip* Recipe for country mac and cheese? *rip* Tutorial on how to make a men's dress shirt into a dress? *rip*

Then, I took an old accordion folder that I had laying around and filed away all of the articles, recipes, and how-tos that I wanted to keep. Now, my stack of magazines can be recycled (somewhere) and all I have to store is the file folder.

Aaahhh, I feel less cluttered already.

My fabric stash is another mess to go through. I have two plastic storage cabinets (the kind of with drawers) that I'm going to use to sort the fabric by color. The worst thing ever is to go out and get fabric for a project because you didn't know you already had some. Once that's done, I should have a better inventory of what I have...and all of the projects that I have lined up. You know what they say, you're not a sewer/quilter/crafter/scrapbooker until you have multiple projects in various states of completion!

Spring cleaning onward!!