Weekend Project: Before and After

Every weekend, I do a special project. Some weekends it's small, and some weekends it's pretty big. This weekend I am finishing up a bunch of loose ends. I have cleaned and decluttered some main rooms in my house, but there are parts of them that I haven't gotten to yet that are bugging the heck out of me!

Today I worked in the living room. Our bookshelf is our homeschooling bookshelf, with a few religious books on the bottom. It hadn't been decluttered for months, and was pretty awful! I did it in shifts, along with the rest of the living room.

Lion was eager for me to begin. Can you see where he's losing an upper tooth?

Before

After


There's still a lot there, but it's all necessary. Except I'm realizing I need to go through our marker/crayon/glue box sometime soon!

There are a few books on the middle of the third shelf from the bottom that are no longer there. Princess decided to "help" me by putting a stack of cookbooks there, and I didn't have the heart to remove them for several hours.

On to the rest of the living room decluttering zone:

Before


After

That striped thing is our dog's memory foam bed. We found it at Sam's, and since then have had no problems with him sneaking onto the couches when we leave! He loves it, but hates to be around when I'm cleaning. Oh, and after I noticed those fingerprints above the fireplace in the picture, I cleaned them off. Don't you love how I re-purposed the giant wooden salad bowl? It's perfect for the blankets!



I don't have a full "before" of the tv, just in parts of formerly posted pictures, but I wish I had remembered. It looks so much better now! I put candles in the holders after this picture but didn't want to get the camera back out. The kids thought it was hilarious that I got their movie on TV.

Looks like I need to stick those wires behind the TV. Hey, I'm working on not being a perfectionist, so I left them on purpose. Yep, that's it.




This piano was given to us, and we need to have it fixed as a bunch of keys don't work. Mostly it's been used as a catch-all. I took this picture in the middle of the day, so it's harder to see but there were a ton of candles and a huge stack of papers and stuff on top.


The kids loved the scent of the vanilla Pledge I used on it. It's an old piano so it has plenty of marks, but now no fingerprints! The glare shows everything, but it actually looks pretty good in person. I think some Old English is next on the list.

I have some papers to shred from that huge stack, but I may save them to do until later.


That's it for tonight. It's wonderful to be able to relax in here! I've noticed that my level of anxiety is very much related to how much clutter is around me. Now I have one room that looks great! Well, unless I turn around and see the office space, which is atrocious. I'll keep looking in this direction, thank you very much!

Tomorrow it will either be the top of the refrigerator and pantry cabinet, or my boys' dresser and closet. Decisions, decisions...