Tuesday, March 7, 2017

40 Bags in 40 Days - Days 1-7

During Lent, I'm  doing the 40 Bags in 40 Days challenge. A couple of years ago I did the challenge and was so happy with the number of bags I got rid of as well as how more streamlined our home became during and after the challenge.

Concurrently with this challenge, I'm doing the 52 Weeks to an Organized Home challenge. Both dovetail nicely with each other because I am working through the house and have set areas to tackle. I also set some  decluttering goals as part of the UFO Challenge. So, many different ways to simplify my life.

This past week, the focus has been on several areas:

- laundry "room" (actually just a space for the washer and dryer that is in the kitchen) and laundry
supplies drawer.

 
Laundry space before and after.

- blue bedroom - originally it was just to go through the toys in the play kitchen, the dollhouse, and costumes in the closet. Ended up doing this plus cleaning the bookshelves, desk, and tortilla table.

Blue bedroom (above) after removing bags of items to
donate, put in the trash, or recycle (below)

- refrigerator. Threw out anything that was no longer good, we weren't going to eat, or had expired.

- bookshelves in the master bedroom. These hold personal reading books as well as homeschool books and resources.

Above: One of the shelves that holds
some of the homeschool and 4-H resources.
Below: After removing items we don't need.

For Days 1-5, I concentrated on the first three tasks. The result was:
- 5 bags of trash
- 8 bags of recycling
- 7 bags of items to donate

In all, there were 20 bags!

20 bags out of the house!

I have to take a break until the 8th since our garbage and recycling bins are both full.

I'm looking forward to continuing with the challenge and even further reducing the amount of items in our home.

3 comments:

Rita said...

You know it's time to take a break when your bins are full--LOL! :) :)

Pam K said...

It's amazing how much stuff we can accumulate without really noticing. I decluttered our craft room and was surprised with how much stuff we got rid of from one small room. It feels so much better when it"s decluttered!

Suzanne McClendon said...

I'm working on a major decluttering here, too. Thanks for the challenge links! The other day, I took out three bags full of old pre-recorded video tapes. While we will keep our original family videos (baby's birth, first Christmas, etc.), we are working on transferring them to digital files before the old VHS tapes totally die on us. As it is, they are very glitchy. The day before that. I took out two bags of videos. That is just from the one room. I have another room with boxes of videos to go through, too! Though I am far from being done with this task, it is a great feeling to have this part of one room done already. :)

Keep up the good work! Have a blessed weekend.