Mega cross off

So, I get to cross items 5-17 off my organizing list for the 52 weeks of Organizing Challenge. Over a week and a bit I tackled the 13 shelves in our bedroom. We have a double closet and the Billy system from Ikea fit perfectly there. You can see them before we filled them here.



As a whole they looked pretty bad, but individually they turned out to be not as bad as I first thought….here they are in the order they appear on my list.


Okay, not too bad….


This one looks like it just needs straightening


This one isn’t bad except what’s with the take out box? Turns out a gift came in it and the gift has since been relocated to its proper home.


This shelf felt strangely empty…

Books, candles, blue boxes, a piggy bank…


More candles, random heart pillow

So many books!!!


J’s Christmas candy cane and her old shoes?!! The candy cane is on its way to the dump and the shoes have been stored with the rest of the baby gear.

This shelf wasn’t too bad for random stuff – just that squirt bottle of hand sanitizer and a photo envelope. Hand sanitizer is back in my purse where it belongs and the photos in the envelope went to my sister who sent the back framed.


This is where it started to get bad…this shelf is at arm level and apparently it attracts all kinds of orphaned stuff…batteries, exercise resistance bands, bags, receipts…


And it continues….more bags…


This shelf wasn’t too bad…mostly reference materials of some sort.


And my magazines with some books form Alex’s dad. You can read about my magazines here and we donated the books, maybe to BC Cancer…

I tossed a total of about 20 books. Guys, that’s so many books for me. I was pretty proud of myself. I found lots of things that didn’t belong on the shelves…and many things that did. I also discovered a few missing things that I think my be in either J’s closet or the basement…like my Dictionaries and thesaurus. I’ve gone on a dictionary hunt a few times since we moved and always given up and looked whatever it was up online.

The shelves aren’t quite organized the way I would like – but they’re getting there. It does bug me that two of the top shelves have books piled two deep. I ended up with one shelf of family books – references like the What to Expect series, the Health books from our government, a baby name book, a what to do now that you’re a mom book, some toddler activity books, parenting books…that kind of thing. There is an entire shelf of journals. Most of them have never been written in. I have two and a half shelves of books that I haven’t read and one and a half shelves of books I want to reread and then decide if I want to keep them or not…I have a lot of reading to do!

Here’s the after shots. I wish I’d done some panoramics of the before shots…



[clicking on the images, especially the horizontal one should give you a larger picture]

It looks so lovely that I lay in bed and stared at my books for a good 30 minutes last night!