Minimize Monday - claiming my space

I've been staring at my office wondering how on earth I can make everything fit into this small space.  I store all the kids clothes in the closet (clothes to grow into - Nanna is generous, there are 7 bins - and I'm not complaining since I never shop for kids clothes!)  art supplies, books, office supplies, wrapping paper, my wedding dress, boxes of projects, more boxes of projects.  more 'stuff'...  Did I mention it was a very small space?

When I put my boys into the same room, I took over the little bedroom.  Then I went to IKEA. It was kind of putting the cart before the horse, so to speak, as I bought furniture and had a vision but needed to thin out first.  Have you ever assemble a sofa bed futon thing that you have to pull out to assemble in a space that barely fits anything in it?  Yeah.. let's just say it's tricky and I should have taken care of some stuff first. 

My goal is to remove the secretary desk with hutch that I have.  I love it, but it doesn't fit.  In order to do this some stuff has gotta go and I need to streamline here.  I will still have to use the closet for storage, but the room itself I want to be a space for creativity.  A place to relax and read, to write, to scrapbook and to sew.   Right now none of that is happening.  Well, I'm blogging, but that's all the writing that's taken place here in the past few months.

After reading a post over at Bits and Bites with Tina, I decided to jump on the bandwagon and now I'm going to commit to decluttering one thing at a time (more is good, but one is a must) each Monday.   Today I took out the bin of summer clothes.  Put them all into my boys dressers and then packed up a lot of old clothes of theirs.  Winter clothes are ready to be packed away, the too small stuff/ no longer needed stuff will go in a bin in the shed for the October kid's stuff swap meet that we'll attend.  ( a great declutter incentive!) So today I'm packing up one winter hat (too small) one winter coat (will be too small next winter), a bunch of t-shirts (also too small), a pair of winter boots (will be too small) and just to add in something I have some papers I'm recycling because they are no longer needed.

A good first Minimize Monday, I think. If I think of it tomorrow, I'll take a picture to add here.  But I think you can get a visual with the above description.   Feels good to say goodbye to a few things and now I can pack up the 'to keep' winter stuff nicely in the closet without adding a bin because I'll use the same one the summer stuff was in.

What are you going to part with?

ps.. I just saw that Mommy Moment is also doing this!!  Go there, too, for more inspiration.