No clutter in 2015: week 8 update

Here I am for the weekly update on my 2015 goal: to have a cleaner, leaner house by the end of the year. Posting these updates helps and keeps me in track. Every weekend (and on weekdays too, when I have time) I try to tackle a different area of my house. I started with books (not near finished yet) but since then I have found lots of other areas in need. I have donated a lot of things, upcycled others, but there is still much work to be done.

This week I tackled the bathroom cabinets (two out of three, at least, since the one in the master bathroom has not been touched yet).

They weren't exactly cluttered, not in the traditional sense, at least. There was no unused stuff stored there from a long time ago, I'm usually careful about that. But they were messy. Here is an example:

This is how our downstairs bathroom cabinet looked like before.

While sorting though stuff, I realized that most of the mess came from the nail polish bottles and I decided I needed a box to keep them all upright and in one place. I looked all over the house but could not find anything that fit (the downside of having decluttered a lot already).

What do you don't have what you need? You make it yourself!

So I made this plastic basket to hold the nail polish bottles and related items:

And here is a picture of the closet after taking everything out, cleaning and putting things back in their places:

This exercise taught me a very important lesson: no matter how much you declutter, how much trash you take out, if it's messy, it will still look cluttered.

Now I still have the master bathroom cabinet to take care of. And I have two bags full of stuff to donate which hopefully will find a new home on Saturday (from previous weeks' decluttering). We have a lot of things scheduled for next weekend so I'm not getting high hopes that I can tackle more than that, but I will let you know next week!