Spring Cleaning

I don't know what it is about spring, but just the thought of it puts me in the mood for cleaning!  Over the last few weeks I could feel the itch to spring clean start to build and build until I couldn't ignore it any longer.  I designed my own cute spring cleaning checklist to hang on my fridge so I can give myself a pretty little check mark when each task is complete.  I don't know about you, but to do lists have a way of motivating me.

I've already been able to check off two of my tasks. The easiest and most fun task I completed was decorating for spring.  Then I moved on to sorting and organizing the toys, and I was able to complete some major toy purging. 

One thing I definitely dislike is an over abundance of toys that can't be kept neat, and barely half of which get used regularly.  I went through the toys that were spilling into the living room and only kept out a few things.  Then I sorted through the toys and toy boxes in the bedroom and took out things that they no longer played with, or were broken.  Broken and miscellaneous cheap toys went into the garbage, and good toys which are ignored went into bags or boxes and up into the attic.  We have plans to sell those in a yard sale this summer.

That was a big chore and I'm glad to have it done and out of the way.  Plus it made a huge improvement on how the house looks.   Out of all my spring cleaning chores these two things probably make the biggest difference in how my house looks which was the reason I wanted to tackle them first.  The other items are all more deep cleaning things that I will notice, but probably others won't so much.

Here are some pictures of my progress.  I didn't think about getting before pictures, but you can take my word for it that it made a big difference! This first picture is of all the toys that went up into the attic.

 

Here are the two main toy areas.  I'm so excited that all the toys actually fit into the containers now instead of spilling over and creeping out into the rest of the room.