A Week of Organizing and Decluttering. Also, Fleas.

A couple of times a year, I have a sudden, deep, passionate desire to organize and declutter our home.  Commonly, these desires tie into the changing of seasons. So sure enough, a week ago I decided it was time to take a week off of school and do some work on the house.

I never get as much done as I hope, but this week has been very productive.  I worked with the kids to go through ALL their clothing. We donated 6 or 7 full trash bags full of clothes to Goodwill.  It feels good to have all the outgrown stuff out of the house, and everyone's clothes where they should be. Briefly.  It is inevitable that garments start sneaking into the wrong drawers over time.  

I also worked on the downstairs.  We have a storage room and an old bar where there is more storage.

Now, you may look at both of these and say, so what?  Well, I didn't get before pictures and I should have; I assure you both places are far, far better than they were. Also, they are not perfect.  One of my life mantras is "Better is better". I often often often don't have time to do a job completely, but even improvement is great.  The area behind the bar was particularly dreadful to the point that I couldn't walk back there, thanks to the kids throwing a whole bunch of costumes on the floor.  I got that cleaned up.

The kids helped a lot.  It wasn't all me.   I was the mastermind.

Also, our kittens have fleas. This is no great surprise since we rescued them from outdoors so yeah...

They are too little for traditional flea treatments, but apparently it helps a lot to just get a flea comb (which I ordered and received from Amazon), dip the comb in soapy water, and comb them. So today we did that and got a lot of fleas off of them.   The kids and I will keep doing that once or twice a day until they are old enough for a treatment. 

Apparently fleas don't live on people, which is good.  Our house doesn't have carpet and most of our couches are faux leather, also good. So hopefully we don't have an infestation. The kittens live in the sun room, also free of rugs. So we will see. We will keep working on it.