This week you get two for the price of one! I continued with my decluttering purge on the weekend and tackled not one but two rooms: The entryway and the living room. There is one simple reason for this: There’s nothing in my living room. Honestly, the only thing that I was able to declutter was a cabinet that contains our DVDs, video games, and video game controllers. That seemed like a little bit of a cop out, so at my husband’s suggestion we then tackled the entryway, which was a much bigger project, mostly due to the closet. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, let’s look at the living room first:
The Living Room
The first thing we tackled in the living room was that cabinet. Thanks to a new television stand that I bought for my birthday (with gift money), we had a ton of new storage, and it made sense to move our video game paraphernalia closer to the television. Here’s the television stand I’m talking about (isn’t it gorgeous!)
If I’m going to continue with this photo taking thing, I’m really going to need to ditch the iPhone camera.
And here’s what ended up staying in those drawers:
Video games and controllers.
And:
Cords, our Wii, our external hard drive and my sweet Ally Bank speaker (thanks FinCon14!)
We got rid of quite a few controllers and other electronic odds and ends that were no longer functional, so it was nice to only keep what we’ll actually end up using. Now that our cabinet was a little more orderly looking, we started brainstorming ideas to make it a little more modern, and came up with taking the doors off and making it into a display cabinet, like this:
Not a big fan of the yellow varnish.
I’m not a fan of this cabinet, but our eventual plan is to re-stain it a nice walnut colour and add some decorative baskets to the top shelves to hide the less attractive contents. I think that’ll go a long way to making it look nicer.
Other than that, the living room was finished and simply needed to be vacuumed, dusted, and scrubbed. On to the entryway!
The Entryway
As I mentioned the entryway was a much bigger project, mostly because of the spacious coat closet that we haven’t decluttered since we moved in. Before we started decluttering, it looked like this:
Kinda Scary.
The biggest issue with this closet is the fact that it’s so big. It was really easy to just put stuff in there and forget about it. But not today! We tried on every single coat, and anything that didn’t fit or have a useful purpose went into the donate pile. The same goes for the shoes in the bottom. There were several pairs that neither of us wore anymore, but most of those ended up in the trash instead of being donated, because they were very well used. In the end, this is what the entryway closet looked like:
Much better.
That’s looking much better. Overall we removed one garbage bag of trash from the living room and entryway and one bag that will be donated to Goodwill. We also filled an entire bag full of stuff that’s been accidentally left here by friends and family, and returned it all on Sunday. It feels so good to be shedding all of this stuff!
Now that the whole front of the house is complete (office, living room, entryway), its time to focus on the back part of the house – the kitchen, dining room and sun room. Those rooms will all be tough, especially the kitchen and sun room, but once that is complete the entire first floor will be complete! Then there will only be the dreaded basement left. We should have this whole project wrapped up by the end of the month – just in time for Paris!
Tell me about your decluttering efforts this weekend.