The past few weeks I have been a busy little elf getting ready for Christmas at our house. After many hours of cleaning and preparing, I think it is finally ready.
Since September, or maybe even before, my house has been wrapped up in toys, craft supplies and just our mess from everyday living. I have a room in our basement that is used as my craft room, but it was quickly put together when we moved in and very unorganized.
In an effort to remedy this, I moved everything upstairs or to the garage to clean and reorganize for a better work flow in the room. What happened was three months of everything sitting in our front living room and office and an ever growing mess building up around the house.
With little time to fix anything, I decided to let it go until craft show season was finished. It had become the norm and, while it drove me crazy living in the chaos, I knew I didn’t have the time or materials to put the room back together the way I wanted it.
Finally, the first weekend of December was over and craft show season came to an end. I planned to take to “vacation” days the next week to clean, organize and get my house in order.
Also during this time, my daughters decided they wanted to share a bedroom. While I am not completely in favor of the idea, the girls feel more comfortable with each other in the room and it does give us the opportunity to create a toy room to house everything that had been taking up space in living room.
I started work earlier in the week because I knew the task at hand was large, and I didn’t want to run out of time with a mess still on my hands. It was a good thing I did, too, because my oldest daughter ended up with strep throat and was home “helping” me both days.
My crafts were the first item to be addressed. I got all of my storage items in place and slowly started organizing and moving items from upstairs to the craft room.
I have to say, both parts of the cleaning, my crafts and the toys, was very cleansing. I had so much stuff I thought I needed to save that I just tossed including what felt like hundreds of toys from McDonald’s and tons of scraps of fabric I thought I would use someday.
In the end, I had my upstairs living room clean, my craft room functioning and the girls have both a bedroom and a toy room with organized toys. It was a lot of work to do on vacation but coming home to a clean house makes it worth the time.
Contact Jamee A. Pierson
at jpierson@newtondailynews.com