Week 4 of the Catholic Minimalism Challenge focuses on the kids room. I will be writing two posts for this week: part one – girls room and part two – boys room. To be honest, I avoid the kids room. I’m horrified by what lies beyond their doors and I feel ignorance is bliss to what could be discovered in there. My kids are notorious for sneaking things into their rooms like food, crayons, or paint. True story, they secretly brought a pair of scissors to “play” hairstylist and I didn’t have any knowledge of this until I found hair stashed behind the bed (the underneath part of their hair was cut and it was covered up by the rest which is why I didn’t notice it at first). I decided to deal with the girls’ room first since it was the worst of the kids rooms. Three girls share this room so far.
This is what their room looked like in the beginning of the week.
We have had the IKEA cubbies for years now, it holds all the girls folded clothes (shirts, skirts, pjs, leggings, and underwear. We only hung up the dresses.
Notice all the wonderful artwork covering their walls. Needless to say, room definitely needs to be painted. There was a pile of junk next to their closet along with a bunch of clutter on the huge IKEA cubbies. Since we are a larger family on limited income, we do hold on to clothes for hand-me-downs. In the closet, there are huge storage containers that hold out of season clothes. There is a bin of 3t, 5t, 6, and two size 4. I have a daughter who is just starting to fit size 6, a daughter in between 3t and 4t, and another who is in between 4t and 5. Since these are the sizes we are currently in, all these bins are in their closet. Usually outworn sizes are kept in our attic. I did go through all those bins and weeded out anything that was really worn, stained, or just didn’t really like. We were able to get about 3 bags full of clothes to give away. I have plans on getting those vacuum space saver bags to cut the amount of space they are taking up.
My kids don’t have much toys so I prefer for them to not have a lot of toys in their room. I didn’t like the kids really playing in their rooms because they would always sneak up markers, crayons (as you can tell from the wall), or food which would always result in a huge mess. Because of this, there was really no need to have the play kitchen (which they only used to hide stuff in) in the room so we did donate it. We decided to keep the doll house though because my girls will play with it often and it’s one of the sleeping spots for a couple of the kitties.
The biggest thing we got rid of was the big IKEA shelves. This was a tough one for us because I do feel it was a great piece of furniture. We try to limit the amount of girl clothes that are out. Each girl has only 3-4 shirts, 2-3 skirts, a few leggings, 4 play dresses, and 2 church dresses each. I also make sure whatever they have all coordinate with each other, sorta like a capsule wardrobe. This makes laundry a lot more manageable and getting the kids ready easier. When I pulled out all their clothes that was on the shelves everything could fit into 2 cube bins! The way I looked at that was “Wow! This is a really big piece of furniture that takes up a lot of space in this room for it to only hold so little”. So I decided it needed to go, this item I did sell though. I was able to make a good amount of money for it and was able to use a portion of what I made to go towards something else to use for their clothes.
Here is their room now.
We are now hanging up shirts as well and we were able to purge and better organize the top shelf. One of the pink bins is for an extra fitted sheet and blanket and the other pink is actually empty. The three other bins are the girls’ keepsake boxes.
We ended up getting the Trofast bin system from IKEA for their clothes. I love how it looks in their room and it fits all the clothes perfectly. The grey bin on top is the junk/ toy bin. We also moved the bed. Here is a closer look into the new clothes setup.
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