Organized Simplicity: Step 2

This is a continuation of our series on Organized Simplicity.

After having cleaned the master bedroom, we set our eyes on the kids' bedroom, which also serves as their play room. This room is one of the rooms that is hardest to keep picked up in the house because the kids have so many toys and things that they like to get out every single day. Sometimes, when an attempt to keep the floor clean by reducing the number of toys available has failed yet again, we wonder if kids just have some psychological need to cover the floor with something, whether it be toys, clean laundry out of the drawers, torn-up bits of paper, dishes from the kitchen... whatever they can find. It's a frustrating room. We're hoping this process will do some good.

We took everything out of the room first and placed it in the carport. We did this while Mr. True was at work, so we didn't move the two pieces of furniture: the monkey bars and the bookshelf.

Mr. True and I made the monkey bars when the oldest Truelet was a toddler. I have never been confident in my upper arm strength, and I would like our kids to be better than I am. I enjoyed the ideas about the potential of babies in the book Fit Baby, Smart Baby, Your Baby and, although we don't follow the procedure exactly, I like having the monkey bars and other resources available to us. The monkey bars also provide the structure for hanging the kids' sleeping hammocks (see our hammock post here).

The kids' room consists of a 10' x 10.5' area with a 10' x 2.5' closet. The majority of this closet opens on the room and has a hung sliding door that can only cover one half of the closet at a time. Half of the closet is floor to ceiling shelves (usually open) and the other half is storage space (usually closed). A small portion of the closet space actually opens onto the hallway instead of the kids' room and is intended to be used as a coat closet. We hang a few coats there, but we have put a locking knob on it and most of it is the kids' toy library. They can ask for a toy (or a group of toys - stuffed animals and toy food, for instance) anytime that they have returned the last toy they had out. This is one of those attempts to keep their floor clean that I mentioned above. As I also mentioned, it's not terribly effective. But it does reduce the amount of stuff on the floor, so we stick with it.

The pile of stuff that we removed from the kids' bedroom made a pile about 11.5' long by 8' wide by 2' high, for a total of 184 cubic feet. This was surprisingly less than in the master bedroom, but then, I do go through this room and throw things out on a fairly regular basis. Despite these efforts, we added a decent amount of toys and clothing to the throw away pile.

Once the room was empty, we scrubbed all the crayon off of the walls (which was a bit of a Herculean effort by itself, because it is so difficult to scrub crayon off as it happens). The older two Truelets helped a lot. Though we usually use homemade cleaning products, it was worth it to break out the Magic Erasers to get the kids' walls clean. 

Next we moved all of the useful or beautiful stuff back into the room and placed it back where it belonged. There was a significant amount of stuff in the storage part of the closet that we hadn't thought about in years, but it mostly went back in (baby supplies and canning jars). We pared down our VHS collection, but we didn't get rid of all of it. (I inherited most of the Disney movies on VHS from my grandma and have no intention of paying money to get them on DVD.) In front of that, there is room for a large bookcase full of the kids' books. I like kids' books, but they always end up covering the floor (see above). So the books are in small boxes by first letter of the title (A-C, D-E, etc) and I take out one basket each week and put it where the kids can read the books, then put them back on the shelf and get out a different basket. The alphabetizing means that I can find a particular book when I'm looking for it, while alphabetizing by title means I don't have one box of Dr Seuss and one of Beatrix Potter; the books are spread out so you can find something in each box to match your mood.

The toy library was pared down to Duplos, stuffed animals, dress up clothes, toy food (the toy kitchen belongs in their room but is currently in the kitchen to redirect the youngest Truelet, who loves to "help" cook), dollhouse furniture and dolls (the dollhouse itself also belongs in their room, but they hauled it outside and it hasn't made it back in yet), and my Breyer horses (Mr. True's Legos are stored in another room until the Truelets are a little older). The shelves in the open half of their closet hold clothes in baskets (8 outfits each, plus pajamas, underwear, and church clothes), crayons and a roll of pink builder's paper (a thrift store find that has been wonderful for allowing them to do art without feeling annoyed by how much paper they go through - $5 and it's lasted a year),  and a treasure chest where they can keep a few always-available small toys (matchbox cars and My Little Pony toys at the moment). Some out-of-season clothes are stored on the top shelves. (The clothes were apparently all being washed in the pictures below).

Out in the room, they have the monkey bars with hammocks, a rocking horse, a bucket of books (rotated with the ones in storage), and someday the dollhouse and toy kitchen.

This was an impressive purge and we're happy to have less stuff. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem quite finished. In the master bedroom, walking in makes me happy and relaxed and filled with a desire to keep it so nice, which makes cleaning up easier. The kids' room just looks bare. Boring. Uninspiring. But I don't want to add stuff, because I like them having as much space as possible to play in. Besides, stuff means that we have to clean under it, and apple cores get stuck and rot, and they pee on it, and... yuck. So what do I do?

I'm still working on this question. I'm not a decorator and this is extremely difficult for me. So far I've bought some vinyl wall stickers to decorate the walls, hoping that will cheer up the room without requiring floor space. I'm also considering rearranging, possibly allowing the hammocks to hang from the monkey bars to the wall instead of along the monkey bars so that one can be left up during the day to use as a seat (our monkey bars are too short and low to allow the hammocks to fully extend, so an adult sitting in one ends up on the ground). I'm still toying with other ideas to make the room more appealing.

Writing these posts is apparently harder than cleaning the house, since it has been a few days since this all happened. Maybe we'll be quicker to report on the next room we finished: the front room.

Organized Simplicity: Step One

This post is continuing our series about Organized Simplicity.

Cleaning the master bedroom was a monumental task. Though we did the whole house three years ago, Mrs. True has gone through every other room and removed the excess at least once in the intervening time. Not the master bedroom. It became where stuff went to die, crammed in closets and corners and out of the way. Dealing with that took a solid 12 hours of work for two adults, with the "help" of the Truelets.

We took everything out of the room and placed it in the driveway. We then wiped the walls and floor of the entire room and began to sort through the pile that we made. When we started to sort it, we had extracted a pile of stuff from the room that measured 17'x5'x3' on average. Considering the room is 13'x10', and that it has a 2'x10' closet, we could spread the stuff out over the entire floor to a depth of 1.7 feet. Looking at the room beforehand I would not have guessed that. Mrs. True kept moaning, "So much stuff! How do we even have so much stuff?" as we carried out load after load.

Here is the stuff pile:

Here is the empty room (except for a cheese fridge in the closet):

We were asking ourselves continuously: "Is this beautiful/awesome or useful?" If we couldn't honestly answer yes we did not bring it back inside. Things that made the cut: about half the books, most of the clothes (we did pretty well on having a minimal wardrobe, if nothing else), suitcases and bags, a trunk of mementos each for Mrs. True and I, a small set of drawers with craft supplies, a bag of fabric and a sewing machine, basic furniture. Things that didn't: the other half of the books, a ton of craft supplies (Mrs. True explains that somehow some part of her brain keeps believing she's crafty when she's at the store, but never when she's at home), and random junk that had been pushed into this room for lack of anywhere else to keep it.

Here is the room after the clean up (yes, the hammock is our bed; there should be a post about that someday):

And here is the pile of stuff that we removed.

A rough estimate says we put back about 150 cubic feet of stuff. It would pack much smaller than that in a U-Haul, with proper boxes and all, but that works as the first number. Given that we estimated pulling about 255 cubic feet of stuff out, we did very well; we got rid of almost half! Well done us!

The room looks amazingly better (Mrs. True accidentally-on-purpose forgot to take "before" pictures because it was so bad) and we are very pleased. It also is much more motivating to keep such a lovely-looking space picked up. We hope to find the same results with the rest of the house.

Organized Simplicity: Step Zero

As Mr. True and I have been listening to Walden and Thoreau's emphasis on minimalism and simplicity, we both remembered one of my favorite books, Organized Simplicity by Tsh Oxenreider. When I found this gem at our local library three years ago, I devoured it, recommended it to everyone I knew, and followed its ten-day, step-by-step plan to organize and simplify your home. We had intended to do it every year, keeping our home simple, but with one thing and another it's been about three years since the last time we did the entire house. After listening to Thoreau's inspiring experiences, we were both seized by the desire to do it again.

The book is about going through your life and removing everything that doesn't contribute to your purpose and enjoyment. It's in the same genre as the current bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, but I like Organized Simplicity much better. For one thing, the author doesn't make absurd claims that if you do it once you'll never have to do it again or if you use her method of folding laundry you will come to enjoy it. (My hatred of that concept is personal, since I detest laundry with such a passion that my husband sorts it and I stuff mine into dresser drawers without folding at all; I cannot imagine any method of folding that would make me happy to add such a chore into my life.) More pertinently, Organized Simplicity was written by the mom of three young children living in American apartments and suburbs (as well as occasionally overseas - I'm jealous), making her advice much more applicable than that of a single woman in Japan.

The first half of Organized Simplicity is theoretical, talking about finding your life's purpose and making sure your finances and calendar and life in general reflect it. It's not nearly as abstract as some "life purpose" books, but it wasn't something I had great need of at this point in my life, beyond inspiration for the second half.

The second half is a ten-day exercise in which you take every single item out of a room, clean the bare room, and look at each item while asking yourself, "Is this item useful? Is it beautiful?" before returning to to the room if it gets at least one yes. The first time I read this book and shared the idea with my husband, he said, "Beautiful? I don't have anything because it's beautiful," so in our house the question is, "Is this useful or awesome?" (In this one case, I will admit that the KonMari "Does this prompt joy?" might be more helpful if you also have a family member who balks at "beautiful.")

Another factor prompting my desire to do this exercise was seeing my parents, over the last month, downsize from their 3000 square foot house here in Utah to a 500 square foot tiny home in California due to a job change. It is amazing how much stuff piles up in houses. It also made me curious about how big a U-Haul we would have to rent to move ourselves, if for some reason we desired to move. So we decided to not only do an Organized Simplicity on our house but also to measure everything as we took it out and put it back.

This series will document the ten days or so of work we'll be putting into this process. Organized Simplicity divides up the rooms in a general way, but we'll be adapting it to our house's layout and our own schedule.

We have a 1070 square foot house with a storage shed and carport (no garage, basement, or attic) to work with. We do have a large amount of closet space, which I am very grateful for. In this area, we have two adults and three small children, ages 5, 4, and 2, with a new baby due in the fall. The first time we did this process, three years ago, we only had two kids and I had been starting to feel that we needed a bigger house with our third. When I finished the process, I though our house was huge and had plenty of extra space. We're hoping to find the same results this time, because we now expect to raise our family in a home no bigger than this. (Who wants to clean extra square footage anyway?) Minimalism and simplicity is our way to go.

Here is our room breakdown and anticipated order:
1. Master bedroom
2. Kids' bedroom/playroom (one room)
3. Front room (living/family room)
4. Bathroom (yes, we only have one; if we do stay in this house, there will be another half bath added)
5. Kitchen (I anticipate this taking two days)
6. Home office (which someday will be a second kids' bedroom, but they don't need it yet, so it's a catchall space)
7. Storage shed and yards

We are excited to see exactly how much stuff we have and how much we can get rid of. We're happy to invite you to join us on this adventure!