14 April 2011

School Holidays and De-cluttering

School holidays started here on Monday and Hannah and I had great plans. We were going to sort through all the Christmas decorations and tidy them up, donating what we don't need any more and putting any we thought could be recycled aside to work on over the next few days.

Well it's true, the best laid plans of mice and men just seem to go by the wayside. It was cold, our first really cool day of the year so neither of us wanted to get up. I had to, AJ still had Uni and had to be dropped at the bus stop, but Hannah stuck her nose from under the covers and promptly buried it back down again. She stayed in bed until after 11am - a very long lie in for her.

Which meant that we didn't get the early start on the decorations that we had planned.  And by lunchtime I was already busy with other things, including trying to work out why the forum was running slow and working on my book. 

The Christmas decorations were put aside for another day, perhaps over the weekend.  Instead we chose a smaller de-cluttering and organizing job - the craft cabinet. In our hallway stands a large, cedar tall boy. It's very old, over 150 years, and while it doesn't quite go with the rest of the furniture in the house I love it.  We inherited it from Wayne's Great Uncle just after we were married and over the years it's had many uses. It was in our bedroom for a while, but it's really too big. Then it was in the dining room and I used it to store the table linens, placemats, cutlery and so on. Now it's the craft cabinet and it is perfect for this job.

Unfortunately it was in a bit of a mess. We've done a lot of crafting lately and not everything was put away properly. And there were lots of little bits of paper, ribbon, odd stickers, felt and so on all over the place. We took each drawer out and emptied it onto the floor, sorted the rubbish, stuff to donate and things to keep into piles, then vacuumed the drawers. Then, to freshen the cedar, I gave the inside of each drawer a light rub over with some fine sandpaper and of course vacuumed them again.  Now they smell fresh and the bugs and creepy crawlies should be put off.

After sorting through everything we had a small bag of recycling, a rather large bag for a school teacher friend to use in his classroom.  He spends a fortune on craft materials for his class, out of his own pocket, as most teachers tend to, so every little bit helps and I'm more than happy to think that he'll be able to use the paper, ribbon and stickers in the bag. Everything else was sorted and put neatly back into the drawers.

Now the craft cabinet is tidy, I think I'll tackle the wrapping box. But not today, it's time for a cup of tea and some knitting before bed.

*It's too dark in the hall right now for a photo of the drawers, I'll take one tomorrow.

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