True Confessions #1: Laundry Room

Every now and then I have a little flare up where I realize that it is really not ok for me to let so many things slide around the house. Yes, I have six kids. Yes, I homeschool some of them. Yes, I run some businesses. But, you know, so many things that need to be done only take a short period of time, and yet I seem to regularly lack the ability to overcome inertia to get this stuff done.

Now that I have my camera, I have been thinking about starting my True Confessions series, where I will take a painfully honest photo of some area of my home as a "before" photo, and then force myself (and at least a few kids) to clean it up and then take an "after" picture.

Every time I have walked past my laundry room since I got my camera I have told myself that THIS room needs my True Confessions treatment right away. So today, we made it happen.

My friend Alana once came over to my house (several years ago) and commented on how much she would like to have a laundry room of her own, but then she saw the condition mine was in, and promptly changed her mind. :) So, all of that to say that I do not exactly have a good track record with my laundry room.

It had been doing fine until I changed seasonal clothing back in the fall. The thing is, in Kentucky, when the seasons change, you really need about half winter and half summer clothes at any given time. It's so gradual and back-and-forth that you can't get away with a clean sweep. So that meant that as the months went on, I started a pile on a clear surface for clothes that needed to get put away in our out-of-season/to-grow-into clothing closet. The pile grew, but I didn't get around to taking it to the closet.

Then someone gave us a bunch of hand-me-downs and I didn't have time to go through them. So they joined the pile.

Then we must have had some "oh no! People are coming over! Here! Quick! Throw all that junk into this laundry basket and we'll hide it in the laundry room!" moments, because we had a whole basket of miscellaneous junk in there.

And on and on it goes.

So, for quite some time now, my laundry room was looking like this:





















And this:



















So I motivated three of my kids to join me on *not only* folding and putting away all of the current laundry in process, but also switching out some seasonal clothes, and sifting through all of the junk on the surfaces and putting every bit of it away.

We went through all of the hand-me-down clothes, and I even managed to be ruthless is sending 90% of it on to the local thrift store because I just don't want to deal with any more clothing right now. Much of it was in sizes that are big enough that they are too big for 5 of my kids, and into the range where most kids do not want to wear hand me downs at all. Gone, gone, gone!

And now, here are the AFTER pictures:





















(notice the top of my washer is now all clear of all the sticky, gloopy drips of laundry detergent, too!)

I took my little workers out to lunch to celebrate our victory. :)




















Tune in next time for True Confessions #2. (I have so many areas to choose from, it will be hard to decide which one should be next....)