Never Too Soon For Spring Cleaning!

The time change has brought with it more energy than I imagined. Or maybe it's the unseasonably warm weather? Either way, I tackled the most massive spring cleaning job I've ever tonight. I wish I'd taken pictures.

Our Girl Guide group meets at a hall downtown, and over the past few months our 'supplies' have reproduced grown from a cabinet-full to multiple cupboards, boxes, bins and plastic bags overflowing across our storage room. Now that the former Guider's basement has been unloaded into our storage room, we were finally fed up with the mess and decided it was time to do something about it.

It wasn't quite this bad, but every week when we walked into the room, we felt like it might as well have been.

Photo: Ed's Project Bike Blog

It was more like this:

Photo: X-tropia

Our storage room would be Blue Raddish Girl's dream. Oodles of boxes of wooden craft cutouts, pipe cleaners, silk flowers, ribbon, lace, beads, Popsicle sticks (4 boxes to be exact) boxes and bags of felt, foam and 3 bins of crayons. It looked like White Rose had dropped by with a truckload when they were going out of business. In fact, we are fairly certain something like that went down.

We tried to document as much as we could. Our goal is to not buy another craft supply for our unit. We should be okay. Yep, that's FIMO at the bottom. That clay you cooked in the oven to make beads! Do you know what else we found? Gimp. Apparently, it's not called that anymore though. Too politically incorrect. Sheesh!

Pipecleaners - red, neutrals, sparkly, 

Fake flowers - pink, white

Wooden craft pieces, clothespins (dollpins)

Corks

Popsickle sticks - large, coloured and small

Tin lids

Barettes, porcelin faces

Beads

Pom poms

Sequins

Googly eyes

Film canisters

Easter egg dying kit

Balloons

Photo matting frames

Doilies

Ribbon

Foam letters, confetti

Scrap paper, construction paper

Clothespins

Stickers

Plasticine

Silk flowers 

Paper bags - brown, white with handles

Red twisted paper

Cotton batting

Plastic Bottles (Bracelets)

Pringles containers

Walnut shells

Straw hats and lace

Felt

Foam, felt, paper

Seam binding

Yarn 

Drinking straws

Cotton balls

Trillium SWAP kits

Be Prepared Kit

6 SWAPs - don’t know what they are

Parafin wax - 1 box

Crayons - 3 tubs

Coffee filters

FIMO

We actually didn't throw out as much as we expected, but we still left with 2 bags of garbage, 1 recycling bin of cans and bottles, a couple boxes of paper and cardboard and a few boxes still to sort. It took 4 hours, but now we have a cupboard of craft supplies, labelled and accessible to our girls. We have hula hoops and balls where they can reach them (rather than buried under a mountain of boxes that was certainly a liability) and a cupboard of "Guider Only" material. Oh, and we can also see the floor again!

Perhaps, I'll take an 'after' shot next week to brag a little...