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Mess |Pad Patter 12.24.18

bestcee

bestcee

In love with places I've never been to
Joined
Dec 18, 2013
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Mess. Mess. Mess.
We live in a 3 bedroom home and I hate that I have to admit this. The third bedroom has become a catchall mess! It has books and craft supplies in there, but has also become home to toys, random cords, blankets, extra pillows, and the dog bed. I'm not sure when the last one made it's way in there but the dog is loving it.

You can move around in there, but it needs to be cleaned up! And I'm sure there are some things that need to go out the door.

Do you have a room that just attracts messes? Or does your house stay fairly neat? Something about the holiday season brings the cleaning and decluttering bug to my mind, so this room is on my list starting Wednesday. Any tips?
 
Thankfully everywhere we've lived has enough rooms for us. Meaning we don't have any extra unoccupied spaces. So the rooms we have play their purpose.
In general though, I am not a "catchall" personality and purge both physical and virtual collections often.
 
Hmm. Our master can easily be turned into a catch-all because it's large and, besides sleeping in it, I don't spend much time there. But I'm aware of the problem and so I try not to let it get messy. (It's a little funky right now cuz of the bins of wrapped gifts all over lol! I organized them by family and/or event, plus I have my mom's gifts for everyone as she had stuff shipped here for us since we'll be here for Christmas.) The one place that has turned into a catch-all is my office. If someone is coming over, we throw stuff in it and shut the door. Not a great organization method!
 
That was my basement for over 50 years. That has been cleaned out though and needs to stay empty until the gutting is done (water damage of paneling next to outside walls so need to get that taken out to make sure there is no mold).

However, in March when I had carpeting taken out of my office for the new flooring, I had to empty the room. It is my most lived in room... has the computer, a couch, a tv and a table I could paper scrap on. Everything was put into the guest bedroom. I got rid of the desk and am using a folding card table as a desk until I get a new desk. So everything is still in the guest bedroom since I don't have the space to put stuff. I tried to organize the stuff when putting it in there but I think I could do some more. I also think there are things I could get rid of since I haven't used them but until I get a desk it is all staying. Guess I should make a decision on a desk one of these days!
 
Oh, we totally have a room that is a catch all for all kinds of 'stuff'. We did clean it up and make it a 'cat room' for my 3 furbabies... and they LOVE it! But, I constantly find myself thinking that I'll just stick something in there until I need it. Never ends!
 
Our messiest spot all the time is the basement. It's unfinished and we don't do much living down there. Half of it is my husband's "War Room." He paints army mini figures for tabletop role playing games. Another ¼ of the basement is lined with bookcases. I've gotten rid of most of the thousands of children's books I collected in my teaching years, but we still have the books both of us collected in the 90's, plus there are frames and paint cans and other stuff on the shelves. The last ¼ of the basement contains our old sofa (with fold out bed) we bought when we still lived in our apartment in L.A. in 1998 and the huge clunker of a t.v. my husband bought in 2002 to replace the ancient t.v. we had still been using (I think it was from his teen years). The 2002 t.v. might have been cool when he bought it (I didn't care at all about t.v.'s so I don't know) but it is like this huge metal box as tall as my shoulders and about 3 feet wide and it weighs a ton. For a while, when we moved it and the sofa down there in 2011 after painting our main floor and getting new furniture, our kids played Xbox down there. They were obsessed with Skylanders for a year or two. Anyway, also at that end of the basement are plastic boxes of holiday decorations, sentimental children's clothing (my mom sewed a lot for her grandkids), costumes, and other stuff. It's actually not terribly messy in the basement. My husband recently did some weeding out and reorganizing. It's just cluttered, dusty and ignored. Out of sight, out of mind.

The places that attract new clutter the most are the dining room table and nearby credenza, which are in our family room. But they're frequently being tidied up and I don't consider it a mess. I consider it living. I've even photographed the table or the whole family room and made scrapbook pages about their current state. It shows what my family is busy with at the moment. Rhiannon's sketch book and colored pencils have been left on the table most of this month. Caroline brought her computer downstairs to be nearer others while they play Minecraft. For a while she was lugging it back and forth, but then she gave up and it has been on the table for a couple of weeks straight now. A corner of the table is covered with my husband's painting stuff and a small army of Napoleonic French soldiers he has been working on. I think I could make a scrapbook of just photos of my family room table taken over a span of time and it would tell a story. :)

I don't think I have any unique tips. My method for dealing with stuff has two parts. First, I try not to accumulate stuff. And when I need to reorganize mess I make a lot of piles, organizing stuff according to where it needs to go, gradually emptying out the area. Then put everything back neatly.
 
I joke but it is true---- my daughter expands to fill all available space. All of her gifts from her birthday party are all over the kitchen table, along with at least 2 sets of her clothes, and a few coats. Then there is the cake decorating tools, a few earrings, and... so when she wakes up, that is her task today.

Our bonus room is a huge mess. My oldest son's old bedroom as a catch-all for awhile, but we turned it into an art room. It is also where the overwhelming supply of cake decorating tools live on a set of shelves we got just for that purpose. So my upstairs is pretty messy, but I try to keep the downstairs clutter free.
 
I have 3 rooms that are a disaster area LOL. My old scrap room in the basement is full of scrap stuff (from my paper scrapping days) and photography stuff is all over the place too. I need to get in there and organize the scrap stuff as I want to start making cards again but some of the supplies can go to charity or get sold off, probably about half of it. Plus, a lot of the old inks, paints, glitter glues, mixed media products are all dried up and need to be thrown away. As for the photog stuff, I need to sort thru it, sell off what I don't need or want anymore and organize what I'll keep.

Next is the back of the basement, there is an area of shelves and cupboards that is stacked with stuff (don't even know what most of it is, some of its been in there for yrs). I need to go thru everything and probably donate about 2/3 of it to charity and re-organize the rest. I have started on that room and have brought about 8 boxes to charity so far. It's about time LOL.

Then the last room that is still a less is the upstairs spare bedroom. We put an extra TV and furniture in there. I have some boxes/bins of my stuff from my mom that I need to sort thru. I have lots of clothes in there that I don't have room to hang up or put in a drawer so need to get at least 1 or 2 more armoires. I have clothes piled up on a coffee table in there that need to be sorted thru and figure out where to put them. I have all my workout clothes in there and need to sort them and get them into drawers. We have a few bins of stuff in there that I don't honestly even know what they are LOL, so of course they need to be sorted thru. I'm not a neat-freak and I'm the first to say that I have better things to do than housework but I do not like a lot of clutter. I'm ok with a bit of dust, an unwashed floor, but I hate stuff laying around. I can't go to bed without checking kitchen counters and LR tables to make sure things are put away. But all that extra clutter in those rooms is finally driving me nuts, I need to deal with it so......goal for the new year.....prioritize....then deal with it!
 
Sometimes I think my whole house is a mess! I try! My extra rooms are upstairs so sometimes the staircase just gets the things until I carry them upstairs. I do love watching organizing youtubes -- Clutterbug, Clean My Space, and Do It On a Dime! I watch them more than I actually organize!
I have successfully cleaned out and decluttered the "under the staircase" closet. I need to do that to my kitchen soon. My dream is to have clear countertops! :)
 
I'm convinced that (almost) everybody has a clutter/catch all space. Ours is the laundry room because we come in through the garage directly into that room. Next is the kitchen table, that is right around the corner. When DD and GS lived here (until a week ago) I finally had enough and declared both those places off limits to anything that didn't belong in there. I was so tired of never seeing the tops of my washer and dryer.

The master bedroom closet is quite large and dh seems to think that it's limitless in what we can put in there. It's a constant struggle for me to keep that organized. When DD moved in, she took the bedroom that was my space so I had to move everything out of the closet in there and find new homes for it in my closet. That meant pitching a lot of stuff. I consolidated everything to about 3 shelves/areas. I even did a layout on it.

I actually love to organize and was going to become a professional organizer. I had a few clients and it was hard work - they didn't want to part with anything! I organized my daughter's (the one who just had surgery) kitchen while I was there. She said, "Mom, it just doesn't work" and I completely agreed with her. It didn't work - things were all over the place and her kitchen is very large.
 
I'm a fairly neat and organized person (so is my hubby) and I kind of like throwing things out. So most of our house is organized. Plus with 7 kids I just think I have to stay on top of things or it can spiral out of control very quickly!

Our one catch-all room would be our pantry. When we had our house built we made sure we had a big pantry. So big, in fact, that our builder questioned the size (the builder was my brother), but we insisted. I'm so glad we did. I can store craft items, food, we have an extra freezer in there, wrapping paper, school bins for the homeschool group I'm a part of, stuff to take to Goodwill, etc... But it can easily become disorganized since we tend to just throw everything in there to keep the rest of the house neat. I usually organize it every 6 weeks or so.
 
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