Weekends are for projects!!!

I awoke yesterday with one thought in mind:  clean out my storage room.  The before pictures are so embarassing.  I'm fortunate my family hasn't turned me into Hoarders:  Buried Alive, I hear they're always looking...

I clean this closet out about once a year, but old habits die hard and somehow the storage room quickly fills back up again.  As you can see, we couldn't even walk in there.  When it got so bad that the kids were risking their lives just to bring me a can of tomato paste, I knew I had to do something.  Check out the after shots. 

I drastically reduced our gift bag stockpile.  Hopefully, this way I'll actually use them!  And I do still have a few framed works of art and other assorted pictures on the floor, but I hung up five from the stash and gave away a few more.

This was a "quick" clean meaning I left the upper two, out of reach, shelves as they were.  I'll tackle holiday storage, well... around the holidays.  I accomplished my mission, which was to make our storage room safe and usable once more.

The "quick" clean didn't actually go that quickly.  It turned out that my little storage room project led to mini projects all over the house.  Each item that I took out had to either find a new home or find its way to the garbage or giveaway pile.  And often the items that found a new home meant rearranging other items in that location.  For instance, I took three large pictures from the floor of the storage closet and hung them in the "office", or the room formerly called Daddy's Special Room which has since become Mommy's special room, aka blogging headquarters.  Of course, the walls were not bare, so that meant taking pictures off the wall and finding new homes for all of them!  I like how it turned out, though.

I had to carefully angle this shot so as not to show my paper monster lurking on the coffee table.

 
The picture that this cheerful oil painting replaced was a truly ugly work of art.  What an oxymoron!  I don't know what I was thinking, but I bought this papyrus in Cairo years ago and had it framed when I came home.  I'm sure the heiroglyphic writing means something special or I wouldn't have bought it, but I've since forgotten, which pretty much means it's a meaningless ugly work of art.  Anyway, I'll probably move it to a less visible part of the house.  (Notice I didn't show you any pictures of my dining room, otherwise known as the room right next to the storage room.  Let's just say it's next on my to do list.)

And lest you think this is all I did over the weekend...

I wandered into Big D's garden to see if there was anything to pick and came back with this.

After I took this picture, my husband actually brought in two more butternut squashes and about a pint of green beans.

We chopped the bellpeppers and froze them spread out on cookie sheets then placed them into pint size freezer bags in 1.5 cup increments.  Big D cut and flash froze the green beans.  I cooked three of the butternuts, scooped out the yummy part and drained it in the fridge for a couple of hours before freezing it in individual bags for baby food.

You'll just have to trust me that this is a freezer door newly stocked with garden veggies : ).

I also canned 8 pints of dill pickles this weekend and told Big D it was the last time I was doing dill pickles... EVER.  It seemed lots more complicated and definitely took longer than doing bread and butter pickles, which we like just fine.

And finally to finish the weekend, Twinkle Toes and I made homemade pop tarts tonight.  I adapted Laura at Heavenly Homemaker's recipe.  We made a raspberry jam infused frosting for them, too, and decided to scoop it into a ziploc so that tomorrow morning we can just snip the corner and the kids can squeeze the desired amount onto their pop tarts.  Cool, huh?

Uh, you can probably tell that the chefs sampled their creation.  We felt it was our duty.

Well, it was a profitable weekend.  Now back to school tomorrow.  What did you do this weekend?  Any projects?