Make Room Challenge - Week 3: Clutter and Entry PART 1

In the last few weeks I have done a whole lot of reading this book: Make Room For What You Love By Melissa Michaels of The Inspired Room Blog and thinking and pondering about what I need and don't need to make my home happy and calm and functional.  As you know by now, I am taking part in the Make Room Challenge to organize and declutter and in turn make room for what I truly love.

This week's task was:

Clutter and Entry 

Make Room for Arrivals and Departures

The entryway and mudroom of my house is the biggest clutter magnet of all!  Awhile back I streamlined our "Command Center" - which is such a funny term to me, because sometimes it does seem like I am trying to direct rockets into space with all that I have to manage around my house!  Anyway, that space has been working pretty well for us and it didn't need much work except a quick sort and purge.  You can see what is looked like before here.

Here is what it looked like on Monday:

Okay, not terrible, but after only a few minutes of sorting, it looked like this:

It's amazing what can be done in a few minutes if you have a good system.  We have a magazine file from Ikea that has a slot for each family member's important papers.  This has been great!  A friend of mine asked me once "Where do you keep all your mail and school papers?" and I pointed to that magazine file.  If the paper needs to be kept, or if I need to deal with it later in goes in that file, otherwise it gets immediately recycled or filed where it belongs.  Bills go into a binder pocket with our family budget, so they never get misplaced.

We also keep a clipboard with our weekly meal planner/grocery list.  I have seen (and even made) some really cute weekly meal planners, but I always revert back to this old one from my friend Sarah.  What I like about it is I can write my meals for the week and my grocery list and then on Sunday I can just tear off the grocery list part and take it to the store with me!  Sometimes simplest is easiest.

I have also evolved away from buying fancy calendars because found that I would put everything in my phone calendar and then have to transfer it to the paper calendar which was a hassle.  Once I had everything connected on the "cloud" I could sinc my phone calendar, computer calendar and my husband's work calendar.  At that point it made more sense to me to just print out or calendar one month at a time.  I found this cute burlap pin board at Homegoods and I just tack our calendar for the month to it.

I just can't say enough about how good it feels to declutter and make space for space.  For me, clearing off cluttered flat surfaces and moving out things that I don't need and eliminating visual clutter is like walking in the woods on a hike and stopping to take a deep breath of air and noticing the world that surrounds you.

I am realizing that clearing clutter is a spiritual experience for me. Maybe that is why I have been trying to do it for so long?!

I would love to hear how you feel about decluttering?  Leave a comment below or link to your decluttering projects.

I will be back to share Part 2 of this week's challenge tomorrow - My Mudroom!

In the meantime you too can join in the Make Room Challenge or order the book...here.

Command Center Clean up

I am a huge fan of the "drop zone - command center" idea and have always had one (even before it was a term I guess).  However, no matter how much I try it still gets neglected and cluttered.  Between mail and school papers and electronics it's hard to keep up.

So, I set out to clean up the area.  I wanted to keep it simple and not make any major changes because everyone uses this spot and, believe it or not, it's already set up in a way that makes sense.  But, it did need some love on the organizing and de-cluttering front.

It's a small space just as you walk in the kitchen door from our mudroom.  It consists of some old wooden boxes on the wall, and old red cabinet, a few small cigar boxes for holding various items, and some things clipped to the wall.

Here is what it looked like:

Not horrible, but not neat and tidy either.

The biggest clutter problem was mail and random things that needed to make their way to another location.

Inside the cabinet we keep cords, magazines, our budget binder, papers that need to be filed, etc.

We also have an old cash register in this area on our counter that we use to hold pencils, pens, notepaper and stamps (and I guess the random egg of silly putty!)

The first thing I did was empty everything out.  Okay...deep breath.

I started with new baskets for the inside of the cabinet.  I found these cheap, matching baskets at the local dollar store, and I decided to make some chalkboard labels for them.  See this post for the DIY.

I organized everything into the proper baskets, with the proper labels.  That made a huge difference already.

After cleaning the cash register drawer, I added some scrapbook paper.  Then I went through all the pens and got rid of the ones that didn't work and just neatened everything up.

I added a cute framed burlap bulletin board from Home Goods that I used to put the current calendar month printed from my computer.  (This works great for us as opposed to a regular calendar because we send all of our events from our phones to our calendar anyway, so it saves me having to transfer them to the calendar a second time).

I also made the clip board look a little cuter with some scrapbook paper and mod-podge. The clipboard holds our meal planner and grocery list.  

And, the best thing I added was a wall file from Ikea.  It has a slot for each person in our family for mail and school papers, plus one extra slot. I guess I could have labeled the slots, but I figured it could just go oldest to youngest and that would be easy to keep straight.

The oval shaker box holds receipts that I clean out at the end of the year.  The boxes on the wall are where we put outgoing mail or bills, and the small cigar boxes hold business cards, gift cards, sunglasses, etc.

The picnic basket holds my everyday bag and anything that needs to be returned or magazines that I save for my friend.  The big glass jug holds coins (when it's full it can be enough to go out to dinner!)

Small changes in this area made a big difference for us.  It rarely gets super cluttered anymore and when it does it's really quick to put things where they belong because everything has a place.

Here's the before and after:

Not a major huge difference when you look at it, but it is a big difference in the day to day function of that space. It's the little things that make a big difference and you don't have to spend a lot or do a complete overhaul to make it work more efficiently.

The total cost was:

$16. baskets

$7. bulletin board

$4. spray paint for chalkboard labels

$2. for brass fasteners for chalkboard labels

___

$29. total

Everything else I had on hand.