That's three hours of work completely undone

Long night of eating disorder treatment done. I come home, obsessively check Facebook, and read my baby sister's status:

"Things that are less than awesome: When you've thrown something away, because you don't use it, and you open up a cabinet and TADA there it is because someone fished it out of the trash like a crazy hobo."

And to think I just spent the past three hours finally coming to realize that I needed to stop blaming my parents for my problems.

Back room deals

Work on cleaning and organizing our spare bedroom continues, as I don't seem to have time for much else right now. At least this way I can watch the progress. I've always felt that being able to see your progress when you're decluttering is extremely important, especially when you're trying to clean/organize/downsize an entire condo or house. Otherwise it can be a daunting and honestly depressing job.

You can check out the previous posts for earlier pictures that you can compare to these.

I confess, I'm not good at making beds.

Look! The bags of clothes are gone!

Skis are still there though.

Most of the difference comes from having gotten rid of several bags of ill-fitting, disliked, or otherwise ED-inducing clothing.

Pants

More pants

Oh look, more pants. And shoes.

That's a lot of gloves! And mom's snow pants, turned inside out.  But those are a size six, and neither one of us has been that size for a while. Out they go.

In total it's 17 items. I'll skip adding them to the decluttered items list though because I really want to save that for the big stuff. Clothes come and go in my life especially now that my weight is all over the place with treatment. I may have gotten rid of 17 things, but I just bought 8 pairs of paints in two sizes, three shirts, and a pair of shoes to match the shirts and my new and improved mood. I'd grumble, but right now making myself feel good in clothing is extremely important. Whether or not my pants are loose and comfortable regardless of their size can literally be the difference between two days of bingeing followed by days of starvation, and "normal," relaxed days. But we'll discuss that later.

Forward momentum!

before and after: our spare room

I want to thank everyone, particularly EcoCatLady for your support as I navigate the craziness of my six-week stint in intensive outpatient treatment for my eating disorder. Normally it's three nights a week for six weeks but today most of D.C. shut down for the "Snowquester," or probably more aptly termed, the "No-quester." They predicted six-to-ten inches of snow. We got three and it all melted as soon as it the ground...but we did get a day off! I have time to blog and declutter and I haven't done either in a while so I thought I would reward everyone's patience with some before-and-after photos.

We have a two-bedroom condo and out back room has always confused us. It's a normal room, huge at a generous 11 x 16 feet. It'll eventually be our kid's room but for the moment we don't really know what to do with it.

What are we using the room for? What do we want to use it for? I want an entertainment room with a futon and a TV. The Chief Engineer wants a bedroom with a desk. He wants space to play with his k'nex. I want a place to curl up with my feet up and write or read or watch netflix. I don't want a lot of furniture. He wants to have a guest bed. Neither one of us is happy.

Check out the room back in the Fall.

Ginormous desk. Big enough for both of us to work.
It turned out that we didn't need that much work space.

The gigantic queen-sized bed competed for space with
my huge quilting hoop, my guitar, and a poang chair from Ikea.

See that huge square bag in the middle of the photo?
It's a bag full of pillows. Ten pillows, no kidding!

The closet. Not an inch of space to be found.

Then Snowquestration happens and we have free time to organize!

We got rid of quite a bit of stuff. The ikea chair got moved to my work office a while back. The quilting hoop found a home in the living room, the folding table found a home in the foyer, the guitar went into the living room, the cello has vanished, the lamp got donated a while back. Then the Chief Engineer added the k'nex set in the corner, but I'll live. Here's the room as it was this morning. It's got a long way to go and is very messy but I'm much happier with the new layout.

The pillows are now getting used as backrests for the bed. 

I get a couch and the Chief Engineer keeps the spare bed without having to buy a futon.

He keeps the bed -- I keep the bike.

The ironing I haven't done in weeks. And my skis needed a temporary home.
Still need to figure out where those will live permanently.
Hey, at least they're not in the bedroom!
(*cough* like the Chief Engineer's skis *cough*)

Our biggest achievement was breaking down the desk. Being an ikea desk, it was modular .
We took one of the smaller end pieces and re-attached the legs and made a desk small enough
to fit in the closet. There's much less surface area to dump junk and we can close the closet door on it when we're done. I still need to convince the Chief Engineer that we should donate larger top of the desk to a homeless family that can use it.  For now it lives in our free storage unit in the basement.

We have a long way to go but I'm pleased with the results and am lounging very comfortably on the couch/bed writing this post. Hopefully we'll make more improvement in the coming weeks.

So what do you think about what we did with the space? Any suggestions for what we could do with it?