Spring Cleaning

Ben and I took a walk the other day- the weather has been so lovely. The leaves are going to be out soon, and there's some pretty phlox and tulips blooming already. As we walked down the lawn, we were stuck by an awful eye sore- our own balcony. The result of "hurry up and stuff it outside" mentality, its become a pit of items thrust out-of-sight and out-of-mind in the wintertime.

As you can see, once spring rolled around, we tossed a lot of things out there- the right hand pile is actually our Christmas tree packed away, bikes on the left, and wait till you get a hold of our balcony closet...




Its rather embarrassing how horrendous the pile has become. Part of the huge mess is that I needed to dig out our folding table, which was in the BACK of the pile, to take into school one day. I was in a hurry, so I climbed up to the top of the pile (I'm kind of cringing thinking about it) and yanked it up and over the heap, and dragged it out.

It reminds me in a small scale of the show about hoarding. Something had to be done. I've found with a big mess, the best approach is to completely empty out the area you intend to organize, and then go through everything, weed out things to throw or give away, and place things back in a more orderly fashion.



So, for your enjoyment, here's what the balcony looked like AFTER I emptied the whole closet out:

It was rather ridiculous. Two folding chairs, two bike racks, two lawn chairs, one rocking lawn chair, three plant stands, about fifty pots for plants, rags and painting supplies galore, and much more. And one dog, somewhere in the mix. After going through it all, sweeping out the closet, and re-organizing the whole thing I came up with a box of extra things to give away and two garbage bags full of trash (mostly old potting soil from last summer's plants). I also discovered two nails high up in the closet and used those to hang the bike racks and a snow shovel. That freed up some space below, and everything fit much better after I was finished:
















Here's the "before" and "after" to save you from scrolling back up.
Its still not that pretty looking
but a definite improvement...