Reset: Master Bedroom

This one has a lot of pictures.  Mostly because I couldn't get a good shot from any one place.  The joys of small rooms right?  Anyway, there's like 20 pictures in this post.  But since that's worth a thousand words that means you have less to read!
I was nervous about my room because it has become the dumping area for the last 3 weeks.  But I dived in this morning and learned something important: I don't do well with this stuff before 9am.  Maybe even 10.  It was too cold to go outside so the girls were either bothering me or bothering their brother-trying to do school work- and things got a little tense.  Lesson learned.
Shall we begin?

Starting left: The cedar chest has become the house catch all.  The floors had all kinds of laundry, toys, boxes that didn't fit on the cedar chest...general stuff.  And that bookcase has been a procrastinated disaster since it made its way into my room 4 months ago.

With any bedroom, always make the bed first.  Everything seems easier once the bed is made.  I don't know  if it's because it takes up so much space or because you can use it to organize other things.  It's such an easy and quick thing and makes a difference.  Making my bed took merely 5 minutes.

don't judge the lack of cuteness.  We plan to get a murphy bed next year so I don't need to invest in cute linens.  Plus the lighter cover was in the wash.

Next I put away the scant load of laundry left in the basket (tomorrow is laundry day).  

This also took only 5 minutes.

Next I picked everything up off the floor and put it on the bed.  It's much easier to just stay bent over and have everything where it's easy to see.  

It was mostly kids toys and some books at this point so I put everything away or in a box.  I was surprised this only took about 10 minutes.

Ahhhh, I can breathe.

Oh wait.  I still have to do the cedar chest.  Ugh!

I have mixed feelings about this piece of furniture.  It was a wedding present my grandfather made and it's lovely.  But  it's too big for any place I've ever lived in.  And it's a clutter magnet.  If I could find a way to magically keep clutter off, but still be able to access my fabric inside then I'd like having it more.  Maybe it should hold food storage...

So I just dug in.  If it had a place in my room I put it away.  If it belonged somewhere else I put it on the bed.  It was hard to stay motivated at this point and I had to open a window and put on peppy music.

This was discouraging. 

So I put away the big things like laundry and the blanket and made piles for each room.  I moved full boxes to the cedar chest and empty ones onto my bed.  I went through 3 boxes of random items in 40 minutes.  It was tedious.  But encouraging!

When I was done I had boxes of the following: living room, bathroom/hallways, one for each child's room, and one for papers that needed to be filed.  I put them all on the cedar chest, just in case.  This was good because we had a Bandaid emergency I needed to attend to, plus a lengthy break for snuggles and kisses.  After that I felt recharged and ready to put away the stuff!

The stuff on the bed was to go to the shed or car. 

I debated doing the easy boxes or the hard one first.  Ultimately I went with the hard living room one since I'm doing the kids' rooms and bathroom next.  It took about 20 minutes.

Very full, large box of random living room items.

But it was easy to put everything away because I had cleaned it yesterday.  I mostly put things near the bookcase they belonged in and then went around the room putting those things away.

Now my living room still looks great (pretend there's no nasty carpet), and my bedroom looks like this.

Liveable!!

The kids rooms were easy: "here _____.  Put this stuff where it goes."  See?  Easy.  2 minutes.

Two things I did not do: I did not file the box of papers or organize my bedroom bookcase.  Filing the amount of papers I let build up (it's been 2 months) is a very big project that I am going to do when I have a few hours to myself.

I also chose to leave the bookcase alone because I knew I couldn't do it in less than an hour and I had already spent an hour and a half.  I try to keep it close to 2 hours (or less!) so I don't get burnt out.  This bookcase has never been organized.  It served as a pantry until we got an actual (freestanding) pantry, and we wanted something to hold more of our ever increasing supply of books and games.  So trying to organize it today would have only served to sabotage my house reset.  It's functional.  That's all we're doing.  We're not selling our homes, we're just making them functional again after stress.

I am so excited to hear about everyone who is doing this!  It's really nice to know I'm not the only one whose home falls apart a bit when life happens.  Thank you for being human.
I thought it might be fun to do a linky party on Friday.  I've never done one before so I'll have to google how to do it.  But if you're interested and have been doing a house reset, you can link up and show us your before and after pictures.  Seeing progress in pictures is motivating!

Tomorrow: the bathroom.  I don't have a picture because you saw it yesterday and it looks the same.  The sink is dirty, the toilet needs a scrub, and the shower-actually, the shower isn't too bad.  Since there's no clutter from other rooms, I'm going to estimate 30 minutes.  We'll see!