40 Bags in 40 Days: Days 12, 13 and 14

I've gotten quite a bit behind with blogging lately, but I have a good excuse: my mom is in town!  We haven't been crazy busy - mostly she just came to visit for a long weekend so she could snuggle her grandbaby (Mom still lives in Los Angeles, so pretty much jumps on any chance to come up here and spend some time with Bug).  But just the general upheaval of having a house guest, even one who is as welcome and helpful and wanted as one's Mama, can throw things off.  She has been immensely helpful with this purging project, though!  I had a few key areas I wanted to tackle while she was here and we made so much progress!!  I do come by my packratitude honestly - there were a few times she actually tried to talk me into keeping something I really just wanted to get rid of ;-)  But for the most part having a partner in grime is motivating and makes the work go faster.  So without further ado, here's the rundown of the past few days!

Wednesday: I finished up in the bedroom, organizing Bug's clothes and putting away my mound of clean laundry (although can you really call it clean when it's been sitting on the floor for weeks??)  I also did some more work on my desk, but not enough to take an "after" picture - as soon as I finish the surface of my desk, the drawer, and my files, then and only then will I feel like my desk is DONE.

Bug's clothes gone through for outgrown stuff, tidy and organized

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No more laundry pile!

One box of baby clothes and a bag of her gDiaper system ready to donate/give away!

Thursday ended up being my "day off" this week because that was the day my mom arrived, and I knew we'd work both days this weekend, so although ordinarily I would give myself Sunday off, this week I switched things around.

Friday was the area *next* to my desk, which needed tons of attention.  It had just become the burial ground for all kinds of crap - things I was planning to put up on eBay, stuff I had intended to donate long ago and just never had, it was a mess.  Walking from my desk to the couch was an adventure.  But now it's all either on eBay, donated, or at least tidied - and the exercise ball, which has been rolling around between my and my husband's two desks aimlessly (often catching on the backs of our chairs or tripping one or both of us) finally has a home!!

Cluttered corner:

Clean corner: 

We had enough energy that the cleaning extended to the rest of the living room.  The couch and coffee table had kind of been my "home base" in Bug's early days and weeks for when she was nursing every fifteen minutes (or was it twenty?), and it had gotten to the point where it was really overflowing with her books and toys and pacifiers and various other accoutrements.  My mom made me see that I really needed my coffee table back - and did we ever reclaim it!!

Coffee table in disarray:

Coffee table clean - you can see the surface!!!

Actually *using the storage* under the side table, imagine that!

 One bag of recycling and two bags and a box to donate!!

Saturday was somewhat less exciting in the sense of having something physical to show for the work, but I did actually do some digital tidying.  My mom brought her laptop, which still had some *very* old files of mine on it (we're talking, writing I did in the 90's, at age 8 or so) as well as college application essays.  She asked me to go through it all and see what I wanted to keep and what could be deleted just to free up the space on her hard drive.  College is well behind me (my 10th reunion is this summer...yipes!) so I had no trouble deleting the college application stuff.  A lighter laptop, in the metaphorical sense, is a good thing!!