Tidy House THE FINAL PHASE

Freedom is...knowing what I have and where it is AND completing long term dangling projects. I've labeled this post "2013 dangling final tidy". Yes, we actually have ARRIVED at the LAST phase of complete tidiness! I'm expecting it to take a couple months to finish up everything and come into freedom. It brings tears to my eyes and joy to my grateful heart! From messy to marvelous!

Part of "freedom" is to "know what I have and where it is" so I'm going through each room and getting to know what I have and where it is. In this process of going through each room (a FINAL time), I'll be doing some rearranging, purging and possibly purchasing. (Why not make it easy and call it Positioning, Purging, Purchasing?!)

POSITIONING: I want to have the things I use accessible and everything else into a storage mode. It doesn't have to be tucked away in the attic, but labeled and contained. When we moved, some things got stuffed onto shelves and never properly situated, now is the time to do organize (especially the pantry).

PURGING: Now that we've moved, I want to get really sleek, getting rid of stuff we just don't need to hang onto. Our lives are 1000% improved since we offloaded a ton of stuff during the move (thank you Christi!!!!) and there's still more that can go.

PURCHASING: There are a few items I feel that would help us stay organized or help us in one way or another. I've been keeping a list of things, so now as I go through our final phase, this may be the time to purchase these items. I could us a reading lamp in the tv room and a shelf for inside the frig, for example.

Today I had the idea to put a label under each cubby and use this method to tidy up the shelves. I can easily do a cubby label anytime, so I grabbed my daughter and taught her how to use the label maker with me. We made eight labels and stuck them on the shelves that were easiest to organize and purge. Then we took a few minutes and tidied each cubby! Nothing else goes in these cubbies which are now labeled (besides the contents that belong there). There's a shelf in the dining room and two in the playroom. Now I have eight cubbies (out of 75-that's over 10%!) that are DONE and labeled. I have another 10 or so that are ready for labels, but I can do that another time. It will be fun to see all the cubbies colored in soon!