A little bit of elbow grease…

Or a lot…Okay…a heckuva lot. Our disaster otherwise known as the garage, office, and playroom has met a silent and deadly death. The piles of things, lack of floor space, lack of organization, and serious lack of car-parking room is slowly but surely disappearing. To be fair, it has been a crazy couple of years…no sooner had we moved into this house then life suddenly got quite crazy. Some boxes have sat unopened in our garage for going on a year or more…some was furniture that wouldn’t quite fit anywhere else…some of it was just junk that we had never quite gotten to the dump. But what it added up to was an unusable 700 sq. feet of space. James’ desk was so overloaded that he had to balance his laptop on his knees, and the only "clear" space was on my crafting table turned desk that I was constantly moving stuff off of. And finding anything? HA!

With the kids out from under foot having a blast at "Grandma Camp", James and I have turned this into a working vacation and attacked the mess. Luckily for us, the church is having a garage sale to raise money for the youth mission trips this summer, so we donated four pick-up truck loads worth of furniture, clothing, knick knacks, and toys. It saves us the trouble of having to price and run a garage sale of our own, and does some good! There was also a few runs to the dump as well. It is amazing to me how much *stuff* we had laying around.

Most of the furniture we put in the new playroom and office is from IKEA…with a price tag of about $250. I love, love Ikea. They are environmentally friendly, all of their materials are chosen from sustainable sources, and they are cheap! Gotta love European minimalism… it took us maybe an hour to put all the furniture together.

Did I mention that I can pull my van into the garage after nearly a year?!?!?

Before: (although, these aren’t exactly "real life"- we had already begun to move things out before I remembered to take a picture!)

After: