The Great Purge of 2020

For me personally, a new year always motivates me to organize and refresh our house. Out with the old and in with the new, right? I like to go room by room and purge everything we don't need, spot clean hard to get to areas that don't get as much attention during our normal week to week cleaning, and then re-organize everything based on our current needs. Having a baby and a toddler though makes it difficult to just hit it hard for a few days though and have it all done, so I've decided to give myself a week per room for the next 14 weeks and I want to invite you all to join me! Here is the breakdown I will be following for the next few months. I already started with week 1 last week but I believe this is good to start any time of the year, so instead of listing dates I'm only going to list week numbers.

Week 1 - Kitchen
Week 2 - Pantry/Fridge
Week 3 - Dining Room
Week 4 - Entry Way
Week 5 - Living Room
Week 6 - Master Bedroom
Week 7 - Master Closets

Week 8 - Kids Rooms
Week 9 - Kids Closets
Week 10 - Linen Closet
Week 11 - Bathrooms
Week 12 - Playroom/Office
Week 13 - Basement/Laundry Room
Week 14 - Garage

The routine I have for organizing these rooms is a modified Konmari method. If you're unfamiliar with the Konmari method, you can check out Marie Kondo's book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I modify the method though by taking everything out in sections versus everything in the entire room. If I took everything out in a room, I just wouldn't have time to go through it all and organize it before Kai could get to all of it. So for instance, in the photo you see above, I took out all the dishes from this section of cabinets and went through every item and separated them in to 3 different piles; keep, trash, donate. I set aside everything I'm going to keep, throw away anything that is broken or unworthy of giving a new home, and set aside items that I plan to bring to Goodwill. After everything is out of the cabinet, I wipe out the cabinet and clean any really dirty spots. Then I organize all the items I'm keeping in to smaller piles to help me figure out a good placement in the cabinet. This is especially helpful for drawers, like a junk drawer or large utensils drawer. At the end, I put everything back and move on to the next section until I run out of time that day. I finished our kitchen last week and it has motivated me so much to keep it cleaner and organized. I moved some things around, too, because over time, life changes and you may need items in a different section of the kitchen now compared to last year. For example, I moved all our baby bottles and food jars to the cabinet with all our kids plates, bowls, and cups. We had the bottles and jars in a different cabinet since we weren't using them last year, but now that Finn is here, we obviously use the bottles frequently and will be using the jars again before we know it. It's nice to have it all in one place and it looks so organized all together.

The whole process is so satisfying and I'm looking forward to doing the rest of the house! Next up for us is the pantry + fridge! I'll be doing periodic check-ins on here and showing plenty of progress on my Instagram account, so make sure you're following along there, too. I hope you all have a great rest of the week and happy 2020!