Time kept slipping past, and I kept feeling completely AGAINST decorating for Christmas. Yet I knew that decorating would a) allow me to check off another box on the ol’ To Do List and b) might help rachet up the level of holiday cheer around here. And I DO like to decorate for Christmas, preferably before Christmas Day arrives. Yet… another day would pass, and I still couldn’t bring myself to decorate.

Finally I figured out what my issue was. My house is a MESS. There are boxes everywhere (neither my husband nor I can bring ourselves to throw away any of the 15 perfectly good boxes we have received from various companies and relatives; it is the pickle jar situation all over again) (do you ever receive a box that is a certain or unusual shape and size and find yourself thinking, “Oh, THAT is a GOOD box.” No? Just me?) and the detritus of my holiday card mailing project was strewn all over the kitchen table and Carla’s LEGO advent calendar (which is darling, by the way; one of the items she opened is a tiny LEGO hamster!!!) is set up on the island, and all of this accumulated junk has prevented me from doing my normal weekly cleaning of the downstairs. And I just COULDN’T BEAR to a) add more clutter to the clutter or b) put up hard-to-clean-around decorations on top of ALREADY DUSTY surfaces. I just couldn’t do it.

So! In a burst of cleanliness, which we have learned never to ignore lest they disappear and never return, I sprang into action! I hauled the vacuum up from the basement! I got out the dusting materials! I moved all the boxes into my office, which is Box Storage Central and I hate it but what can you do. (I even managed to recycle a box! No – TWO boxes!) I consolidated all the holiday card stuff and moved it up to my husband’s office. I wiped down the kitchen table. 

Once I had cleared limited the clutter, I could begin a Regular Clean, which includes scrubbing the sinks, wiping down counters and cabinets and appliances, dusting, and washing/vacuuming the floors. 

And then I had to stop, because construction paper was hanging out of the bottom of the white craft cabinet in the hallway. (I specify white because we have a greenish piece of furniture in the kitchen that is ALSO a craft cabinet. This will become relevant shortly.) I unwisely pulled on the scrap, and more construction paper followed it onto the floor, along with some bits of cardboard, a few googly eyes, a feather, two colored pencils, an empty Ziploc bag, and a small piece of pipe cleaner. Sigh. 

Well, cleaning the craft cupboards is completely unnecessary to being able to do any other cleaning, and yet I have been meaning to do it, and Carla was upstairs occupied by Virtual School, and I KNEW it would feel good once it was done. So I dove right in, Internet. Just plugged my nose and leapt right on in there.

I was so intent on diving right in that I forgot to take a Before Picture of the white craft cabinet. I guess here is a photo of the right side cleaned out but the left side in progress.

And here are two photos of the cabinets (and floor) mid-clearout.

Carla supposedly keeps construction paper in these cabinets, but I found that she was also using it for storing… other things. (See above RE: googly eyes, pipe cleaner bits, string, etc.) So I remedied that right away and now it only holds paper or paper-adjacent items: cardstock, watercolor paper, etc. 

I threw away a LOT of Projects, which always makes me feel bad. And then I was left with a bunch of things that still needed homes, like a bunch of markers and a bag full of pompoms and googly eyes. Things that belong in the OTHER craft cabinet.

Onward, to the green craft cabinet!

Now, brace yourself.

This is how it looked to begin with. Your classic Monica Geller’s Closet situation, amirite?

It took a surprisingly long time to divest the cabinet of its contents.

Like, over an hour just to REMOVE things, let alone do any organizing. 

Carla is, it turns out, extremely skilled at stuffing a piece of furniture more full of things than its creator could possibly imagine. 

One might think that it would be good parenting to have CARLA come and clean out this cabinet. After all, it is her domain. Everything inside it is for her use, and it falls under her management, day-to-day. So you might think that it would be best if she were involved, both in undertaking and understanding the amount of work required in cleaning it, and in reorganizing it. And of course you would be correct. BUT Carla is incapable of throwing things away. (With box and pickle jar hoarders for parents, it’s so very hard to understand WHY she is this way.) Discussing whether to throw away every single scrap of paper would, I’m sure, have resulted in many tears and plaintive bargaining and extreme desolation. So I did it myself and I am fine with it.

Surprising findings: a spoon that I’ve been looking EVERYWHERE for, a Tupperware container, the instructions to Carla’s Snap Circuits kit, three pairs of scissors, two small silver washers, a nut (the hardware kind), and many, many pens. 

I threw out several containers of very dry, crusty Playdoh. I threw out many broken crayons (I know there are creative people who would turn those broken bits into Something but I was in purging mode not creative thinking mode, and I did not want to get derailed). I threw out a bunch of parts to old Kiwi crates. I threw out the trunk and wrappers from Carla’s arts and crafts supply library; none of the supplies were IN the trunk or wrappers but were instead strewn about the rest of the cabinet. I threw out SO MUCH CONSTRUCTION PAPER. In one burst of creativity, Carla had masking-taped blank pieces of perfectly good construction paper to one another. Many, many pieces. For a while, I tried to remove the tape so she could put the paper itself to good use, but during my clean out I just THREW IT AWAY. I also bought a brand new pack of construction paper earlier this week because I am an enabler, apparently.

I threw out even MORE projects. I did it swiftly, lest Carla come downstairs and cry over the ball of scrunched up masking tape coated in purple glitter or the little baggie filled with foam-and-googly-eye monster faces. I do feel bad about throwing away her creations – I DO. She is SUCH a creative kid and I love watching her come up with ideas. Sometimes, she’ll just decide to like, make a costume. “I’m making bunny costumes, Mommy,” she’ll inform me. And then she’ll create little bunny-paw gloves and littly bunny-ear headbands and fluffy tails and carrots and we will put them on and hop around for awhile. It’s darling and she is wonderfully adept at turning paper and tape into recognizable and wonderful things. (The bunny costume was near the bottom of the bottom shelf; it went into the trash.) (I’m not heartless; I gave the bunny costume a fond and wistful look as I was sweeping into the garbage bag.)

But she has so very many creations. And many of them go into the craft cabinet to be forgotten forever. Others are half-finished, or half-conceptualized when she shoves them into the cabinet. 

Some of the projects, I just don’t understand. For instance, there were at least three baggies full of scraps of paper. That she had cut, painstakingly, into bits, for some unknown purpose, and then stored carefully in a baggie for future use. And I just… threw them away. 

We had a bunch of activity books in the cabinet and I was really able to pare that down. I got rid of a long abandoned puffy sticker play set, and a three-quarters-used create-a-face sticker book, and a hardly worked-on First Grade workbook. There were even a couple of things that she had never once opened and has since outgrown, like a paint-with-water book and some of those awesome mess-free glitter project books, so I put them in the donate pile. (I had forgotten about the puffy sticker play sets and the mess-free glitters things – man, we bought a LOT of those for a LOT of years; they were always a big hit and good for many hours of quiet play.) 

There are a lot of books remaining – coloring books, which she seems more into now that she’s a little older (even though the activities strike me as a little young for her), and books of mazes, and books about how to draw animals. Maybe now that they are easier to see/access, she’ll use them more often. 

Finally, I was able to fit (nearly) everything into the bins that were not really fulfilling their purpose. Ever the optimist, I labeled the bins for ease of maintaining order. I wiped down the shelves of the cabinet, put the books and bins back in, taped a few colorful items I couldn’t bring myself to throw away onto the doors, and voila! 

Let’s look at the before and after, shall we?

After the cabinets were tidy — whose cleanliness, again, was 100% not necessary for me to be able to do my other cleaning — I was able to do a nice thorough cleaning of the downstairs. And then I felt ready to start putting up the Christmas stuff. 

But, even if it wasn’t necessary per se, it was still VERY satisfying.