{"id":1517,"date":"2009-03-21T15:09:19","date_gmt":"2009-03-21T20:09:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.momstoolbox.com\/blog\/?p=1517"},"modified":"2009-03-22T21:24:57","modified_gmt":"2009-03-23T02:24:57","slug":"long-overdue-de-clutter-for-my-7-year-old","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.momstoolbox.com\/blog\/long-overdue-de-clutter-for-my-7-year-old\/","title":{"rendered":"Long overdue de-clutter for my 7 year-old"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not too long ago I hosted a party with a bunch of sweet three-year-old princesses and their siblings. I think they all had a fantastic time… but they also used some of their magic powers to destroy my seven-year-old’s bedroom. He was not so impressed. And I couldn’t really blame him.<\/p>\n

So, at bedtime, we just piled up all the mess on a rug and decided to get to it later.<\/p>\n

The rug pile sat there for about a week, dwindling a bit day by day. But real action needed to be taken.<\/p>\n

While he and his dad were away on a Cub Scout adventure, I decided to clean up the mess and move a few things around in his room to make it easier for him to play, clean and just enjoy his space.<\/p>\n

I started to work before it occurred to me to write about it, so my before picture doesn’t really show the full mess of it:<\/p>\n

\"Photobucket\"<\/a><\/p>\n

My first project was clearing off the bookshelf.<\/p>\n

I decided that he had too many books in his room to choose from, which made selecting a book a bit too overwhelming. I couldn’t even find any books, it was such a mess! (He also has two other smaller bookshelves not in the photo.)<\/p>\n

I mentioned my idea to slim down his pickings to the school librarian a few days before and she applauded my idea.<\/p>\n

She said her son keeps six books in his room, but can switch out with other books at any time.<\/p>\n

So I piled all the books into a big bin and moved them to our gameroom and dining room. (Yes, we have a whole wall of bookshelves in our dining room.)<\/p>\n

Then I cleared off all the toys and knick-knacks and sorted, stored and discarded them. (Lots of donating in our future!)<\/p>\n

Next I moved the bookshelf with quite a lot of effort.<\/p>\n

It seems my husband took his job of child-proofer quite seriously when we moved into this house and our oldest was 20 months. He had attached straps on the back of the shelves and a door hinge to the top. That sucker wasn’t moving without a LOT of effort!<\/p>\n

Once I swapped the bookshelf and the chair, I dug out some cool red bins from our attic. (We used those in our second son’s nursery. I had bought them on major clearance at Target almost 6 years ago! Still love them!)<\/p>\n

My second son (age 5) was at home with me and helped through the process. We put the toys in the bins, labeled them and put them in the shelves.<\/p>\n

At one point I asked him to put a toy in the “Science and Spy” bin, forgetting that he is very new reader. He looked at the bins and told me he knew which bin to use because it was the only one with “and.” I was pretty impressed with him for figuring that out and laughed at myself for expecting him to be able to read my labels.<\/p>\n

As we were finishing the transformation, my husband and older son returned home. My husband helped hang the picture (which had been sitting on the floor to be hung for about 4 years) and the transformation was complete:<\/p>\n

\"Photobucket\"<\/a><\/p>\n

My oldest loves his new streamlined shelves, his revised look and we have found many books we had forgotten about. And we’ve stayed on top of the clutter, which has been really nice.<\/p>\n

PS I need your help! Any ideas on how to manage all those books on my central book shelves? Please read my latest post on this <\/a>and help if you can. Thanks!<\/p>\n

\"momflower\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not too long ago I hosted a party with a bunch of sweet three-year-old princesses and their siblings. I think they all had a fantastic time… but they also used some of their magic powers to destroy my seven-year-old’s bedroom. He was not so impressed. And I couldn’t really blame him. So, at bedtime, we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-moms-journal","category-home"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.momstoolbox.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.momstoolbox.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.momstoolbox.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.momstoolbox.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.momstoolbox.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1517"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.momstoolbox.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1524,"href":"http:\/\/www.momstoolbox.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517\/revisions\/1524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.momstoolbox.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.momstoolbox.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.momstoolbox.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}