Downsizing- Shoes and Cleaning Mode

So, yesterday I stopped by Bed, Bath & Beyond just to see what sort of organization systems they have. I ended up walking out with a foldable dish rack and an over-the-door shoe organization system. Until now, our shoes have been strewn across the floor of our bedroom closet, and it's always a major pain to sort through them.

Once I got home I went into "cleaning mode." My cleaning mode is when I have this overwhelming desire to clean until I'm exhausted. I actually enjoy cleaning when I'm in my cleaning mode, but it very rarely happens. The rest of the time I abhor housework and try to do as little as possible.

So anyway, I went into cleaning mode, hung up the shoe organizer in the hallway closet, and brought all of our pairs of shoes from the bedroom into the hallway. I sorted through my pairs and decided which ones don't fit me anymore, which ones I haven't worn in forever, etc. and added them to my pile of donations. Yes, I know, I'm a woman who doesn't appreciate her shoes, sue me. :p

Then I went through my miniscule purse collection and sorted through those to figure out what I could get rid of there (yup, don't care about purses either). Then I did the same thing with my sweaters and my sleepwear drawer. So now I have an even bigger stack of things to donate in the living room. Yay me!

Then I moved our food/games table from the middle of the living room to the wall by the kitchen to make the space seem a bit bigger and finally got rid of a box of Christmas paper from last Christmas that's been sitting by the door. I brought this out to the recycling bins next to our apartment (of course I filled it up with the rest of our paper and cardboard recycling first). Made another recycling run with a load of bottles and cans and then resumed my cleaning.

I got rid of our rather nasty feeling (from being next to the stove and getting splattered by grease) old dish rack, and made sure the new one fit in the space. Then I folded it up again and stored it against the wall by the sink. I also moved all of our dirty dishes to the little bit of counter space between the sink and the stove, and the rest of the countertop now looks surprisingly spacious.

All in all, I'm very happy with my work, as was DH when he came home after work. I believe his exact words were, "You can spend money on this sort of thing any day," and "Do you know how sexy you are right now." I'm pretty sure that last part was in reference to the clean-ish apartment.