guest room overhaul

Our next house project is an overhaul of our guest bedroom.  While we have had a few guests, the room really is just a catch-all for us.  I'm not saying it looked great back then, but when I took part in a garage sale in July, I decided I wanted to get rid of several of our super cheap bookcases.  They were filled with books of course, so we boxed everything up and stacked the tubs in the guest bedroom ... along with everything else.  Need a can of pink spray paint?  Done.  How about an outdated paramedic manual?  No problem.  How about a bicycle?  The guest bedroom's obviously the most appropriate place to store it!

And this was about ready to make me scream:

Awful, I know.  Embarrassing, actually.  But, I've never made any claims to be housekeeper of the year either, so it's not like this is my dirty little secret.

The problem is we have too much stuff.  I got rid of two bags of trash in just a quick sweep around the room last weekend. We boxed up the books that we just can't store now but can't stand to get rid of (because, you know, we might read all of those books sometime in the future).  We took some furniture to my parents' to store until we have a bigger house.  And I gave back the extra bed frame my parents gave me when I got my very first apartment five years ago, because it's no longer needed.

Now that the room is a truckload lighter, I'm still left with this mess:

Sad, really, how much stuff you can amass and not even realize, thinking that you might need it one day.

Stay tuned though.  Over the next several weeks, we'll be redoing the room and will keep everyone posted with the details.

And hey, this probably made everyone else feel better, because surely no one else has a room this messy, right?