So this is it – the end of the month of reJanimation! I couldn’t be more pleased of what we’ve achieved this month, and all for what turned out to be relatively little effort and under £100 expenditure.
Bathroom: totally reorganised, new storage, ‘new’ bin, toys tidied away
Spare room: wardrobe w/drawers sorted (two drawers empty), chest of drawers sorted, all under bed stuff organised, sewing things organised, knitting/crochet stuff organised, dressing table cleared, toiletries sorted and brought into use, make up ditto, 49 bobbles stored in bobble box!
J’s room: new storage bought, all toys organised, books on shelf, unused items put back into boxes for storage, corner of miscellaneous rubbish cleared, pictures hung, metal noticeboard from kitchen reused for magnetic letters
Landing: airing cupboard organised, spare bedding stored, whole shelf empty
Master bedroom: side tables cleared, general junk removed, new wastepaper basket, my chest of drawers sorted
Study: completely tidied and organised (my husband’s big job)
Stairs and hall: pictures hung, curtains hung over door, pushchair stored away, basket installed for shoes/hall stuff
Under stairs: completely cleared of junk, storage reorganised, CDs put together, photos all in box/albums, bags on old racking from bathroom , coats and shoes sorted through, extra hooks added, old coats washed
Dining room: toys organised, expedit cleared (one basket empty), paperwork system created, sideboard completely reorganised (drawers for cables, place mats, candles, stationery, cupboards for J’s drawing stuff, unused frames, pen/stationery box, battery/bulb box)
Kitchen: tea towel drawer sorted, cake decorating gear together, two cupboards reorganised, baskets for veg organised, space by door sorted and cleared
Utility room: high shelves sorted, room made for ‘spare’ box to put extra tins/packets, rubbish removed
And a million tiny jobs you wouldn’t even notice but make the house run more smoothly. I don’t think I did anything in the living room but it was OK to start with.
That’s one month’s work.
I never felt overwhelmed or like stopping, for a few reasons – one, part of ReJanimate was that anything counts. Folding some t-shirts could be a day’s task if you’re tired or busy. Two, it got so much easier as I went on, as more and more things found a ‘home’. When I sorted the drawers of cables I was able to make piles of the extra stuff I found and say definitively where it all should go – so simple! Three, the more I did, the more I wanted to do. Everything looks better. And four, avoiding making lists worked really well. There’s no looking back now and thinking ‘oh, I never got round to that,’ and feeling like a failure. Of course there are always more things to do, but there’s also more days in which to do them.
I also realised that the house was not, actually, full of crap. Sure, I threw out a lot of bags of rubbish, but it was all either packaging, broken or obsolete stuff. There was hardly anything that was just useless or unwanted. So my original aim, to reuse unused stuff, has really been achieved. I have a much clearer idea of what we have in the house and what we need (pretty much nothing!).
I ended on an absolutely classic ReJanimate today – something that summed the whole thing up. Our bottom drawer in the kitchen was a dumping drawer, but so was one of the drawers in the welsh dresser. So I emptied both drawers, refined and amalgamated the contents into the welsh dresser, moved the pans into the bottom drawer, realised the pan cupboard had a higher shelf than the other cupboard, thus moved the big boxes of cereal off the top of the wall units into there, chucked out all the expired cereal, moved the condiments into the shelf above the cereal and that freed up a full cupboard for multi packs of crisps, bottles of squash etc. Phew. Again, not much work, not hard, free…but still, it hadn’t been done!
January 31st: reJanimated kitchen shelves and cupboards.
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