I am very excited and feel I have a good handle on things as far as getting ready to move mainly because of my yearly purge of the house that occurs every year around this time! Perfect timing for a move!

Purging my house is like crack to me. I LOVE seeing stuff that we no longer need or use moving on out of the house. As much as I love purging the house, I equally hate clutter. It gives me the hibbie-jibbies.

This pile of stuff is all from my recent purge of every nook and cranny in the living room, kitchen, laundry room, hall closet and the girls’ bedrooms:

Eight garbage bags full, one small grocery bag, an old computer and Little Bug’s crib mattress (not pictured):

In early March, Dave and I tackled our bedroom, bathroom and closet and came up with 6 garbage bags full of stuff to giveaway!

That is a total of fourteen garbage bags of stuff that we got rid of! I LOVE IT!

Simply put, Americans have too much stuff. I refuse to accumulate stuff that we no longer use or need. It truly is a breath of fresh air to get rid of stuff and have every space in my house organized and productively put to good use.

Anyone can do this!! Two simple steps.

1. Get rid of ANYTHING you don’t need or don’t use. My motto is, if I haven’t used it in over a year or more….OUT IT GOES!

2. Make a list of what you want to go through. Mine looked like this:

• living room (tv stand, desk, toys)
• kitchen (drawers, cabinets, pantry)
• laundry room
• hall closet
• LB’s room (clothes, toys)
• SP’s room (clothes, toys)
• girls’ bathroom (drawers, cabinets)
• Master bedroom (end tables, dresser, under the bed)
• Master bath (drawers, cabinets, linen closet)
• Master closet
• Garage
• Attic

3. Go through the house one drawer, one cabinet, one closet at a time. With two small kids there is NO WAY I could go through the entire kitchen in one day (unless I took all of naptime to do so, but even this organizational freak doesn’t like to do that!). So I did it one drawer and one cabinet at a time…over several days. I certainly DO have 15-30 minutes here and there to tackle one drawer or one cabinet.

My incredible parents kept my girls for me to be able to go through every single toy we own and organize and get rid of toys no longer needed and it was a HUGE HUGE help. Getting into their rooms like that is obviously impossible during naptime and after bedtime, so having them out of the house to get that job done was SO helpful. It was something I needed to do as I had never really done that before since toys started coming to live here nearly 4 years ago. I weeded through all the toys and at the end of my toy purge I had two large boxes full of toys to give away.

The rest of the house was done while the girls were sleeping - one drawer, one cabinet, one closet at a time!

And now, we have moved on to the next phase of this moving process: Packing!!

- Elaine