WFMW- more mean on clean-upstairs

In keeping with my mean on clean week- what works for me this wednesday– is to declutter the upstairs. when we bought this old house the upstairs consisted of a short hall and a bedroom and then another huge room. And an added on as an afterthought bathroom. When the house was built there was no indoor plumbing, so the bathroom truly is an afterthought. Well we made the huge room into two bedrooms giving us a total of 3 bedrooms upstairs. 1 really big, 1 really small (2 boys in bunkbeds) and the original average size. The original bedroom had a closet that looked like a big dark cave, it was gross and creepy. Well now that April has a hubby and has moved, it only made sense to see what we could do about evening out the space upstairs. So me being the take charge Momma that I am, I demolished the cave closet! It was kinda blocking a window anyway and now the boys have much more breathing room. It increased the size of their room by 1/3. Instead we will now put the closet rods on the walls with shelves and put bifold doors up, no more cave! And no more place to stash stuff. Because when someone was coming to visit and we did the “speed clean stash everything trick” those walk-in closets were perfect places to hide stuff. Stuff that needed to be weeded through and gotten rid of. But you know when you are a big family everybody gives you all of their stuff, and then of course there are those extended family members who can’t pass up a deal at Goodwill and go on bag day and bring it all to you. That does not work for me. But today I have 20 hefty bags to sort through, and here is my big Momma tip. When there is stuff piled up you tell every child, “get your stuff, Momma is coming with a hefty bag”. If they haven’t collected it in a reasonable amount of time Momma takes it and either gives it away or sells the items back for 10 cents per item. Now the bags I have to go through today are not from that, but anything else I get after this cleaning will be. Since our youngest is now 5 I don’t feel the need to store as much as we have in the past. Ahhh, the seasons are changing.