Room One: The Yellow Bathroom

As a high school teacher, I am blessed with being able to have summers off to restore myself for the next school year. As my task for the summer, I decided to take on the task of cleaning out my house one bag per day - starting today! I have the goal of cleaning and reorganizing all of the ten closets in my house, my kitchen cabinets, my three bathrooms, one playroom, four bedrooms, living room, and laundry room between today and August 25, 2013.

The Rules

I am using 30 gallon trash bags and the one-year rule. If I haven't used something in one year, I am either going to throw it away, recycle it, or donate it. My children are asking me to have a garage sale, so that is a possible way to recycle items, but I really just want to clean house and get rid of things that have been sitting around occupying space. It has been almost exactly 13 years since we moved into the house - we moved in during June of 2000, so our family of 4 has accumulated a lot of "stuff" in that time.

Room One: The Yellow Bathroom

Today, I started with the cabinets and drawers in our "yellow" bathroom. This room is where my 12-year-old daughter and I get ready each morning (at different times). It has a full bath/shower that no one uses because we all shower in our master bath. So, this is the bathroom that is filled with bottles of beauty supplies, lotions, perfumes, nail polishes, cotton balls, etc.

Since the tub is never used, it has become a holding cell for bottles (mostly Avon stuff) that we never use. This is where I began. The lotions were all in a boot box and I know that all of the bottles are over one year old, so I simply threw them in the garbage bag. Then, I moved to the six drawers and the cabinet under the sink on the vanity. These drawers had recently be cleaned (in the last two years), so they were not as bad as tub. But, there were some old collections of Ulta makeup, hair products from the days when I had curly hair (haven't had that in three years), and more old Avon stuff. In the trash it went!

I did find a few things to keep, like hair ties, a comb, and some lip balm. I also found a few nail polish colors that I could keep. (I do love painting my toe nails). I reorganized the drawers so that my daughter and I can find what we are looking for more easily. Since there wasn't much left, it was quite easy to reorganize. I also had a few more drawer bins available keep each drawer neat.

The fun part was the medicine cabinet behind the mirror. I never open that thing, so it was strange to see what was still in it. My daughter used to suck her thumb as a toddler, so the nasty tasting anti-thumb sucking nail polish from ten years ago was still in there. Ironically, as I was cleaning out the medicine cabinet, my nine-year-old son came to see my progress. As he walked in, I looked at the medicine bottles (most of them empty) and the dates. There were things in that cabinet that were older than my son! I threw away everything in the cabinet, then put in a couple of boxes of bandaids I found in the drawers and the two brand new bottles of Swimmer's Ear that I found, too.

The entire process today took less than 30 minutes. I do feel badly about the fact that I am throwing away so many unused or partially used personal care items, but since they get old, sticky, and ineffective over time, I cannot donate them.