Organizing 101

My friends know that I'm an "organizer". Not really anything cool about it but more and more people are starting to realize how clutter, hoarding, and unorganized lifestyles create stress and chaos in the home. When things are neat, put away, cleaned even, they feel more relaxed and peaceful. This is what I strive for. I watch shows like Clean House and Hoarders and it makes me want to get up and go organize something :) In my last post about Badin Lake, the trailer we had was small but we only had in there what we needed. I remember one time being at the Lake with Dad and it was raining so I decided to clean out all the cabinets and rearrange them. I think I was 10 years old...so this nature of mine is something that has been around a long time. 

Before Adam and I got married, I house-sat other people's homes. When I moved out the last time and into my Aunt and Uncle's Carriage house 6 weeks before the wedding, the stuff in storage had to be gone through. I spent some of the fall going through each container and weeding out what needed to go. Then, the weekends when I would come visit Adam, we spent time going through his things. We had one yard sale at the house in Georgia and then what didn't sell we took to Charlotte and had another one. 

Overall I think we made about $320 dollars at our sales. Not bad for some hard work and old junk. What had not sold by lunchtime, we gave the people there boxes of different sizes and told them $2 or $5 for different sizes and they could put as much as they wanted to in them. What didn't go then, went to goodwill. Tip: Don't take anything back home! Donate it. So we had purged everything we didn't need.
When we got here after the honeymoon, Adam's parents brought my car full (and packed by my awesome friends!) of the rest of my things, all our gifts and placed them inside the house for us. Very nice of them! I wish I had a picture of what it looked like then. I spent several weeks working on the clothes, closet, laundry, putting things away. The things that didn't have a spot just yet went into the 'junk room'. The junk room then turned into an office once my Aunt and Uncle gave us a desk and bookshelves that we could use. Here is a before of the junk room. It was actually way worse, this was just when I thought to take a picture!

And after...

I definitely still have work to do with photos, making albums, wedding stuff, and decorating, but this is a start. What do you think?