Week 3

Started in the bedroom this week which is great as it's one of those rooms with a bit more clutter than the others! Back story on the big declutter here, here, here and here. 

The list this week was:
Bedroom – Kate’s wardobe - Wed
Bedroom – Tom’s wardrobe - Tue
Bedroom – Makeup and cosmetics - Fri
Bedroom – Ottomans - Sat
Bedroom – Ottomans - Sun
Bedroom – Under the bed - Tue
Bedroom – Under the bed - Wed
Bedroom – Trunk - Mon

Remember - All 20 minutes each and leaving the stuff in the 3 categories (although ours have now kind of morphed into one huge pile due to lack of space to spread them out but we'll sort that out at the end!).

I did change them around this week a bit as there is a bit of mould back on the wall and ottoman on Toms wardrobe again so I wanted to do the ottomans over the weekend and give them all a good clean while I was there. It's condensation mould I think, as it isn't coming up from the floor or down from the ceiling like damp, it has just appeared in a fine layer on the middle of the wall, wardrobe and ottoman. We're trying to control it but will let the landlord know as if we keep cleaning the wall the paint is going to start coming off!

I actually haven't started under the bed properly yet (we went climbing yesterday after work, then food shopping then the next installment of The Walking Dead came on DVD so we got distracted!) but kind of inadvertently started it when I did the ottomans as one had loads of space in so I moved some Christmas decorations from under the bed into it. Tuesday is Toms day off and I left him his clothes to go through and the one ottoman which is full of his stuff.

Ottoman one (those are empty boxes which for some reason I keep, both the playstation and Wii are about 5 years old, not much chance we'll be returning them!)

 Boxes out

Spare pillows and rest of Christmas decorations in. We now have a bit more room in the hallway wardrobe and under the bed we gained 2 whole storage boxes which did have these decorations in them

The trunk also had a pretty massive overhaul. I've come to terms with the fact recently that I do not wear heels nearly as often as I think I do, and when I do I can't walk in them. So most of my 'dress up' shoes in here went, along with a lot of little clutch bags and loads of belts. I kept the big bag on the top I just put it with my shopping bags where it'll get used as I kind of forgot about it in there!

Perfect room for my climbing backpack and harness, which have just been hanging around in the hallway

I'll do under the bed later today and tomorrow, but look at the pile to go - we're making good progress!

 There are also all these books behind it under the chairs

I didn't get a photo of the second ottoman as Tom took a few things out of it to add to the to go pile and very nicely put it straight back on top of the wardrobe,so now I can't reach it! However, it also now has some empty space in it so once we've done under the bed there might be more things to go in there.

Bedroom Brainstorming

The bedroom is the room that I most dislike in our flat, the new wardrobes help but the rest of the furniture is so mismatched as it just always looks such a mess as nothing has a home and just seems to be out all the time.

exhibit A

The trunk just collects junk, we got new pillows and want to keep the old ones as spares but they were waiting for us to find somewhere for them. We got memory foam pillows when we got the new mattress and we love the mattress but the pillows are very hard and we never really got used to it. So we got the 'super bounce' overstuffed pillows from silent night and love them!

This side of the room is also really cluttered and my hair products, makeup and jewellery seems to have spread over 2 areas although I don't actually have that much!

We also have to leave the drawers out from the wall a little so we can get to the window to open and close it, so it just kind of floats in the middle of the space

 It's full of clothes, tops in the middle drawer and dresses in the bottom

However I also have dresses in my wardrobe, which is looking a little crowded, but I thought I could maybe get all my dresses together in the wardrobe.

 I had a brutal clothes cull, the pile is for Ebay, one bin liner for the bin and the other for charity

I bought a few vacuum bags from the pound shop a while ago, so also vaccum packed a few things (like winter clothes and holiday stuff) and slid it under the wardrobe

I then swapped the drawers and chest around, much better! I can step on the trunk to open the window so it can go right up against the wall. This was actually all I set out to do that day and it kind of spiralled into a complete reorganisation of all my stuff!

It's nicer to have less furniture going on in this corner, it looked a bit crowded with all the drawers.
I've got all my clothes together on one side of the room as well as all my hair stuff and makeup which is nice.

Although my shoes, bags and belts are still in the trunk

I managed to get all of my makeup jewellery and hair stuff together here after a bit of a throw out, I'm not a big makeup wearer yet still had tons of it! So now all I have is makeup in the bottom drawer of the wicker drawers, hair stuff in the top, my glasses are in the silver bucket with my hairbrush. Underneath are my jewellery boxes and larger hair stuff like cans of hairspray, my hair dryer etc.
 I also cleared the top of these drawers so Tom can have a bit of room for his stuff

And look, empty drawers! I'm not going to fill them for the sake of it and keeping them for if we need space, the top one is Toms man drawer, and the second one has all my glasses cases and a few random things in. I managed to get all my underwear and socks and tights which were in here into the chest of drawers in place of the dresses (which I did manage to get into the wardrobe) so all my stuff is together in one place.

It looks so much clearer and cleaner in here now, the mismatched furniture is still a slight issue but we will eventually get a new bed and I will do something with those drawers above I just need to figure out what. I've debated painting them, covering them, just getting rid of them (reluctant to do as we struggle for storage in some areas), moving them to another room...but nothing has really clicked or inspired me yet.

Bedroom Progress

After the new wardrobes arrived the bedroom looks so much better already

 We will get another ottoman for Toms wardrobe at some point I think

Although there is still a bit too much clutter on this side for my liking Under the bed looks better, we swapped the bedding out of the ottoman that's on top of my wardrobe for things like Christmas decorations, empty boxes and other stuff we aren't going to need very often. Because I can't reach into the ottomans it has to be things in there I can wait for Tom to get!

I also moved this canvas off the top of the tank in the hallway onto the trunk

This side of the room looks a bit bare and the other side looks a bit cluttered so I think I might move some things away from the window to balance it out a bit more at some point. The thing leant against the radiator is a guitar stand that apparently doesn't work very well so I'm going to see if Tom might want to get rid of it, the pile of frames underneath the radiator I'm hoping to find places for in here, and the thing on the radiator is Minty's cat bed

It's not exactly pretty but she loves it :)

Shoe Storage

Since we got our new wardrobes I had to find a new place for my shoes as my wardrobe won't fit anything hanging over the door, so the shoe rack had to go. My day to day shoes live by the front door, but there's not really enough room in there for all of them. Luckily as we had the new wardrobe in the hallway my lovely old trunk was empty and just waiting to be put to use.

 Ta-Dah!

The bedroom was still a mess when these were taken, as you can see in the top picture we still have 3 wardrobes in here, but it's looking a bit better now as my old wardrobe went to someone on freecycle and we've tidied it up a bit in there. I'll share the pictures soon!

Bedroom Organising

Our bedroom is the room most in need of some TLC, so I made some small changes in here recently to make it a bit more livable, we still have loads of stuff we want to do in here and want to replace about 90% of the furniture (seriously Toms wardrobe is going to collapse soon!)
It looked like this when we moved in

These are our old bedside tables which I just put in this corner when we moved in, I'm going to either spruce them up with a coat of paint or some spray paint, or get rid of them, depending on where the rest of the room goes. We can't use them next to the bed as it's placed in front of the fireplace with the wardrobes behind to make the most of the space in the room, and these are too big to fit next to it (Actually for bedside tables they're massive)

 There is so much stuff under the bed as it's our only storage space for larger items

That box by the door is the last box to be unpacked after moving! It contained all my old Avon paperwork, most of which went in the bin as I don't do Avon any more.

After buying 10 plastic storage boxes from Argos (12.99 for 5 with lids) and 2 over door shoe hangers (6.99 each), I was able to reorganise some things and get it looking more like this.

I got my shoes off the floor and into the shoe hanger, and also reorganised the top of Toms wardrobe, swapping some things out of the ottoman in the hallway so it could be moved in here and the bedding taken down and stored in it.

Also it gets these frames off the floor, they're pictures from our first holiday together to the Dominican Republic

The Christmas decorations and lamps that were on the floor here are now under the bed and on top of Toms wardrobe. We do still have 2 armchairs in here in these pictures as I was waiting for Tom to take this back to his dads, we borrowed it while we didn't have a sofa (Thanks Mike!)

This armchair is ours and used to be in our living room but with the new sofa doesn't fit, so in these pictures it's in the bedroom, although it didn't stay here for long.

It also made a massive difference that Tom went and bought us a new paperwork file from Staples, as ours didn't survive the move so in the pictures above there is a massive pile of bills etc on the floor on top of the mangled paperwork box file!

It also meant we have one less thing being kept in the hallway after the ottoman was moved into the bedroom so that looks a bit clearer as well

So that's our small reorganisation just using what we had and some cheap storage solutions, the 2nd over door shoe holder was used elsewhere and those plastic storage boxes have definately been worth it as we've used them all over the house, and at 12.99 for 5 with lids they are the cheapest I've found. Ikea do have cheaper ones but we weren't planning an Ikea trip any time soon and by the time we would have paid for delivery (I don't have a car and even if I did I'm not going to drive all the way to our nearest one in Bristol or Birmingham just for some boxes) they actually got a bit more expensive. There are rumours that there's going to be an Ikea built in Gloucester (in the space opposite Asda by the train station), I was actually far too excited on hearing this, and if the rumours are true our house will be full of lovely Ikea things and I will have no money!

Junk in the Trunk

We downsized to move to our current flat from a two bedroom to a one bedroom, although we didn't lose a lot (if anything) in floor plan as we do have those 2 hallway areas that make up for it. However we did lose the garage and the attic which were both full of stuff at our last house. This means that although we got rid of a lot of stuff before we moved and are still getting rid of things now we are eager to get our hands on any storage solutions going.

After our trip to The Range to get our book shelves I went back to get some things we saw there but didn't buy at the time. One was this:

A set of one large and 2 small hampers, £49.99. Which is a bargain for how much storage space they allow, they were destined for the hallway.

I just wanted to make the room look better and a bit more usable as one side looks like this which is fine (Although the bookshelves don't match as 2 were in our spare room and one was in the living room at our last house)

But turn around and hiding behind the door is this mess

So I filled both our new hamper and the old trunk that's hiding under all that mess in the picture above with smaller items

All of Toms music equipment I sorted into this small chest of drawers that we have had for years, it's even filed (You can tell I'm not the musician huh?) into top drawer microphones, headphones and misc small items like plectrums, second drawer pedals and bottom drawer cables. I restrainied myself from labelling the drawers. I'm really not that sad that I file everything just, well, um, ok yeah I actually probably have some kind of organisational system for most things. My nickname really should be Monica, although my need to organise everything has found me a job that I'm told I'm good at so it has it's up side!

Much better! The view now when you walk in the front door

And to the left the shoe rack

And to the right the bookshelves and our spare chairs (Freecycle finds that I repainted that colour a while back, I'll do a how to at some point) and Toms amplifiers.

I got this old chest for £10 from a guy who was selling the whole contents of his house, he had such an interesting attic full of stuff like this and I could have bought about 10 of these from him if we had room for them! I'm planing to clean it up (Not too much though as I like the worn look) and maybe even use it as a coffee table.

Although this room is mostly for storage and we don't spend a lot of time in here I do like having some pictures and pretty canvases in here as we pass them every time we go out the door.

Our post and key bowl and some pictures of our beautiful nieces

The obligatory lint rollers by the door - we have 2 cats! Underneath is a box full of our gloves, scarves and hats and our bike pumps etc and backpacks. The canveses all came as a set of 3 from Asda a while back.

That was the first change to this room, I expect there will be loads more as we would like to make the room a bit more useable not just a storage area. The eventual plan is to get a large wardrobe or storage cupboard so that we can store large (Toms amplifiers, our suitcases) and small (tools, board games) things in there. There is so much stored under the bed that it's all starting to poke out the sides and it would be great to get some of the larger items like the Christmas tree out from under there (as I never considered it before but where the hell do you keep the Christmas tree when you don't have an attic?!). The hamper could then be reused in the bedroom to store all the bedding that is currently shoved on top of Toms wardrobe in an ikea bag. The smaller hampers don't have a home as yet but I'm sure I'll find somewhere for them before too long.

The other thing I bought was a solution to an issue in the kitchen, more on that in another post. 

P.S like the snazzy title? I thought it was hilarious when I thought of it...not so sure now