An empty dining room!

I’m done, with one major thing, at least.  The dining room has been cleared out, minus a few things that I need help moving.

Of course instead of leaving well enough alone, I decided I would go ahead and start the hall closet.  I pulled everything out of it, and all that is now on top of the dresser and coffee table that were left in the dining room.  This means that I will now need to clean the dresser off again, before I can get it moved out.  It really won’t take me more than an hour or so, I hope, to sort through the stuff.  A good portion of it will go back into the closet.  The rest will go where they belong, or into the garage sale pile.  Even though it shouldn’t take that long to do, I have run out of energy for the night.

I’m hoping I will figure out how to put pictures in this thing, because when you start with a ton of things in a space and end with very little, you just have to show it off right?  Wish me luck and let’s see if I can get this to work…

I was going to plug in a picture from when all of the furniture from the two bedrooms were in her, but you really ccouldn’t see much over the mattresses.  Just know this room was FULL with only a pathway through it.

These pictures are where I started from this week. 

I also realized after I started cleaning that I would have to deal with this area as well.  It is the area under my bar in the kitchen.  It is where the two rolling drawer units that have been hanging out in the dining room will need to go.  When you have no pantry storage one must get creative.

After three evenings of work the room now looks like this…

…and this…

The box and bags on the left are trash.  The containers on the right are ones I emptied while going through the things in the room.  The mirror came out of the middle bedroom, and I plan to hang it on this wall, once the painting is done.

During the remove of items I had a thought I’ve had many of times.  Cleaning is just moving things from one place to another to another.  The only thing different was that I actually understood if I had less items that didn’t really have homes, there would be mess to move from place to place and that cleaning may actually feel totally different to me, once I complete this process.

But until then, I am still having to move things around from room to room.  While the dining room is virtually empty, all of those items had to go somewhere.

My bedroom stuff went back in my bedroom.  Most of the clothes got hung back up in the closet, though I still have a clothes basket full that needs to go in there.  The dresser items are still in the boxes I put them in, because the dresser is not coming back into my room, until it is painted.  Or at least that is my hope.  This limbo business is part of the things that are driving me batty, but anyway.

I had a few items that’s homes should have been the linen closet, so they got piled up in front of the door.  They are now back in the dining room, but that’s okay, before it is over with, they will be where they belong.

That brings us to the next picture…

This my friends is the current ‘garage sale’ pile, items that are leaving my house.

The two of the three big boxes have my previous bedding stuff and actually half of the third box is also some of it, including the curtains.  The rest of the third box are items that came out of my bedroom that I decided would not come back.  The three barstools are also going, they will be replaced with two different ones.

This would be the limbo pile or the to be dealt with later pile.

The cardboard box is full of CDs.  When I get a chance I will go through them and compare them to what is on my MP3 player.

The two boxes behind the cardboard one are staying.  Well the larger of the two for sure, since those are my living room curtains that I pulled down to wash.  Inside the bottom one is placemats, they are a ‘to be decided on later’ deal, since I’m not sure how they will look with the new dining room.

The other four boxes are candles and candle holders (totally different than the ones I had a conversation with myself about last night, as well as some glass jars.  I’m undecided on them at the moment, and am unsure about where their homes will be, or rather the homes for the items out of there I keep.  I’d have to say that compared to all the random boxes of stuff I went through to clean out this room, that these were the least of my problems.

I am, over all, happy with what I have finished.  I am far from done, and some of the things removed from there will have to be dealt with again before I can say I have finished this whole process.  I’m choosing tonight to look on the bright side of things.  While I still may have a box of recipes to go through, that I saved from the trash tonight, it is just one box, and not five boxes with them shoved in there among other things.   I have less random boxes of  the ‘I don’t know what to do with these things, so lets shove them in the box’.  That is progress right?