Simply Monday

For my organizing lately I've been mostly concentrating on the house. I've been working hard to get things sorted and put away. If something doesn't have a "home" then I have to either find one for it or get rid of it.
As for the simplify part - Cameron and I have felt for quite some time that we just have too much stuff. It's not just the junk that you collect and can't seem to ever get rid of, it really is stuff. But we don't NEED this much stuff; we don't need it cluttering up the house, cluttering up our lives, cluttering up our minds. In fact I was just thinking yesterday that it was time to simply my children's clothing (no, I'm not skipping over me, I really don't have that much, I swear, Cameron has more stuff in the closet than I do). They just have WAY too much. And while it's nice that they still have clean clothes even when I don't get around to doing the laundry for 2 weeks, JUST THINK OF HOW MUCH LESS LAUNDRY I WOULD HAVE IF THEY DIDN'T HAVE SO MANY CLOTHES! Especially since I have to haul it to a common laundry - handy to be able to do all 8-12 loads (depending on the week....and the last time I did it) all at the same time, it only takes an hour and a half from start to finish (if I remember to go put it in the dryers right when it's done washing) but do I really need to be hauling that much laundry as often as I do. And then I have mountains of laundry to put away - which rarely happens. So here's what I'm thinking. I go through and they keep 10 days worth of clothes - that way I don't have to do the laundry on the same day each week and they don't have to wear the same 5 outfits to school every week. OK, maybe 10 days, but then add in 2 church outfits. So enough clothing for 12 days (and a few pairs of extra undies - we still have accidents every now and again). I mean really, over Christams break the kids each had 8 shirts (plus 3-4 long sleeved ones to wear under the short sleeves) and 2-3 pairs of pants. And they didn't need ANYTHING else. In fact, I think there were things that they didn't even wear. Ultimately my goal here is to centralize the dirty clothes hamper and just do a load when it gets full.
So - what do you all think - should I go for it? Maybe I'll just take all the extra clothes upstairs until I'm sure that I can do it. Or would that just be too convenient for it to really work?

Aside from my laundry musings, we really did get some stuff done today. I worked a little more on getting the loft put together. I really want there to be a nice area for the kids to do homework and read. It's getting there slowly. Cameron and I also worked on cleaning out the car - Cameron cleaned all the mats last week, so this week we did the floors in the car. It was quite the cleaning job. He was actually spraying water IN the car to rinse off the floor. And then he vacuumed it out with the shop vac of course. The floor looks great, but I have a feeling it's not going to be dry tomorrow, so we'll have to be careful on the way to school.

And I didn't make it into town today - the pharmacy that I needed to stop at wasn't open because it's a holiday - come on! So I'll go tomorrow. That will be better anyway - I won't have to take the kids. As London Tipton says, "Yeah for me!" (If you don't know who London is, you obviously don't watch enough Disney Channel!)

PS - I added a poll to the side bar, so vote there or leave a comment!