Mom with a Plan

New Year – Cleaning Out &
Organizing // Part 1-Upstairs

Julie Gimeno

I prefer to start the “spring cleaning” process during winter break and at the beginning of the new year as opposed to the Spring-time. During winter break you have some downtime from not having school and after-school activities. It’s also good to include your kids on this chore. There’s no reason this dreaded task should only fall onto us Moms. After Christmas, I also get overwhelmed with the sight of toys everywhere.

My process of getting started is pretty simple. I do a walk-through of our home. I carry a notepad on a clipboard and if an area needs to be cleaned out or reorganized, I write the name of the room and below I make a checkbox and what needs to be done.

I’m almost finished, still need to clean out the freezer in the garage & my pajama/comfy clothes drawer in our closet.

Side note: I need to get better at remembering to take before pictures but I do have some to show you. This post is a little personal for me because I am exposing and sharing the insides of drawers and cabinets in our home, so please be kind 🙂

Another Side note: When I organize each space, I’m not a perfectionist about the visual aspect. It’s more from a thought process of: does every item belong in here and do we use/need everything in this space? If I can make it pleasing to the eye then I do it. If the area needs a container or a specific organizer I will purchase it but I don’t overdo it on buying things to organize a space. My main goal is to make areas functional and for everything to have a home to return back to.

Let’s get started….My bedroom desk is a collecting area for receipts, sports pictures and a holding area of items I need to tend to or return. It is an area I need to frequently clean out for it to look nice.

Our hallway cabinets are used to store our cold medicine (high up so kids can’t reach) and extra items that we use regularly. There are two types of people, the ones that go and purchase something after they run out of it or the person that already has it on hand for when they run out of it. You can probably guess which person I am, lol. The planner in me is always ready for when we run out, haha.

I store the medicine in cute photo boxes
All the extra things we have on hand to use when we run out

Luke needed to reorganize the shelves in his closet. He was in charge of doing this himself and he did a nice job.

The top shelf is Halloween costumes that I recycle down to Tyler. The next shelf is a large lego set and books he still hasn’t read, next shelf are clothes he uses for his sports activities. Next shelf is lego sets he is still working on, the next shelf is for shoes/slippers (he keeps most of his shoes in the downstairs hall closet on a shoe rack) and the cases for his video games. The bottom shelf is stuffed animals.

The Playroom needed a lot of work. The toy cubbies needed to be cleaned out and toys put back in the appropriately labeled bins. I purchased them from Ikea and they can be found HERE. Here is the final look at the boy’s toy bin storage:

When we moved into our home 6 years ago, I had all the closets redone. The playroom closet had so much nice storage that I filled it with all the stuff we had but didn’t take the time to actually clean out and sort through it. This had been a dreaded task for me to tackle and I do have the before pictures.

This closet is in the playroom:

I needed to organize all the pictures that we had before storing on our computer was possible
I was reorganizing all the shelves
What a MESS!
Yikes, so messy during the cleanout process

Now for the after pictures…this took me a few sessions to get it organized and functional but it now makes me so happy that I finally completed it, YAY!!

Awe, so much better!
This large pink rolling bag supplies all the things I need for scrapbooking
I use to be a big scrapbooker so those needed a shelf and of course a couple shelves for kids games and craft supplies
These holders are great for grouping items and then labeling the container, you can find them HERE

There is 4-drawer storage and here is how I organized each drawer:

Ribbon to gift wrap
Random Items, labels, banners, envelopes, past employment stuff
Old planners, checks, calculators (maybe I don’t need to keep these, lol)
Top drawer: all the office supplies. These desk organizers are good to use.

We have four large drawers below the shelves and here is how I organized them:

All the Christmas gift wrapping supplies
Extra red albums to hold xmas cards, folders, misc. items
Tech boxes for items to resell when we are done with them, old school CD/disks & misc. items
Tissue paper, boxes, small bags, etc for gift wrapping
I wanted to mention these two containers that I made very affordably. I purchased the containers from Micheals and decorated them with their name and inspirational words & phrases. I think THESE would work well. They consist of items I want the boys to have from their childhood. Think… Xmas cards, school certificates, sports pictures, memorabilia of all the things

The back wall shelves are finally more functional

All the pictures organized into photo boxes
Long containers are great to store wrapping paper. You can find them HERE
Long containers are also great to store flowers & greenery not in use
Gift bags, boxes & flowers I use at xmas time
Thank you cards, file folders and that middle holder has labels & dividers
Finally took books out of boxes because we don’t have a bookshelf
Ahh, all clean!
You can find the Keepsake Portfolios at Lakeshore Learning HERE
Above the file cabinet was another area that collected random cords and papers and looked messy. These Keepsake Portfolios are from Lakeshore Learning and you can find them HERE and are where I house the boy’s most important artwork, papers, and memory books from each school year. They have a bunch of dividers so you can separate items by the school year.

I didn’t want to make this post too long because I had so many areas to clean out this year. The next post will be on the downstairs cleanout.

My motivation for sharing this with you is to encourage you to make that cleanout/organize list. Each week when you have pockets of downtime start tackling the list and in a month’s time, you will have your home cleaned out and looking great for the start of the new year.

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