Mission Decluttering #2 – The Girl’s Rooms

I love my girls but their stuff can be overwhelming at times, OK, all the time.  I have never understood, in all my five years of being a parent, how children accumulate so much stuff in such a short period of time.  And it doesn’t seem to matter what room of the house they are in at the time but their stuff ends up in it, drives me insane!

But how do you declutter their rooms?  I decided that they should be involved, it is their things after all and they should have a say in what happens to it.  It is a good thing that ‘Spring Cleaning’ meant fun times ahead for the girls – otherwise I’d be hooped!

We started out tidying up their room, everything out from under the beds, clothes hung up properly in their closet and folded properly in their dressers, beds made.  At least that gave us a little room to start – but where to start?

Clothes:  In principle I used the same three questions that I used for myself.  However, when it came to does it need work done to be wearable – they’re 5, so it doesn’t really apply, I switched that for can Lily wear it later on?

We had three piles: Donate, Garbage and For Lily.

It was a long and tiring process.  Hard decisions were made, there were a few tears and a few arguments, but we wound up with one bag for donation, a half bag for Lily and a half bag (more or less) that was ready for the bin.

Next up was books, toys and assorted other things.

We finished up their room with a box of donations containing about two dozen books, 8 stuffies and a grocery bag of miscellaneous toys.  This part was WAY easier than the clothes – typical girls!  I did discover in this process that Isabel has a little bit of a hoarder mindset, she tends to want to hold on to everything, whether it has meaning or not.  She still is very good at the donating part, but each item needed a discussion or explanation as to why it should or had to go.

Feeling good about the last few hours having removed what feels like 500 pounds of ‘stuff’ from the twins room, I move on to Lily’s room.  You wouldn’t think that at 4 months old she would need a decluttering of her room, however a baby that grows fast gathers much clutter in a very short period of time.

Her room provided two boxes of clothing we lovingly gave to wonderful friends of ours who recently had a baby girl, a box of stuffies which we thought Lily would love (but what does an infant know?), and a box of miscellaneous décor items which seemed like a wonderful idea when we were decorating her room but just became clutter once we were done and happy with the clean look of her room.

Not bad for a days decluttering!

Up next – Closets!