It's a small victory, but a win is a win right? The baseball card collection did not make it back into the attic but another 10 TUBS of stuff did!

A while back my mother and I started a competition to rid ourselves of the unnecessary clutter in our house. Mind you, this mess isn't on the floors, it was the stuff on the shelves, hanging on the walls, stuffed in a drawer. It was the collective junk that kept us wanting to go shopping for more organizing cubes! I had no idea how eliminating the extras would increase my cleaning productivity.

I can get my house picked up for company in less than fifteen minutes!

Well, if I cram the dirty dishes in the dishwasher it'll look clean! I went through our children's room before their birthdays this fall and, with their help, we peacefully set aside some toys. I put them in rubber tubs and moved them into the attic under the assumption that we would bring them down again later.

(HA HA HA, YEAH RIGHT!)

Because we had already cleared out the extra junk, putting away our new toys was easy! I knew what she was getting in advance and I cleared out the room with a general idea of what was going to need to be put back in there. The after party pick up took less than twenty minutes when usually it would take days.

What's my trick? How did I possibly pack up that much stuff?

Easy...

I set a tub down in my hallway. As I cleaned, if I come across something that has not been "USED" or looked at in a year, it was put in the tub. I'm an emotional pack rat which can make this processes difficult, so across the tub in big marker it reads: