Unfuck Your Habitat

fireundermyfeathers:

It’s my birthday yesterday! (It’s nearing 1am here, but my birthday is August 17.)

 I had a great time: going out for sushi; playing a party game mashup of: pictionary, charades, name that tune!, taboo, and other such things; eating lots of tasty snacks and popsicles. My friends are the best of all possible friends.

 I’m also super proud of what we (A. and I) did before the fun and games began: cleaning our vestibule.

Witness our vestibule, a (often very dark) narrow strip of room that was this morning filthy as all get out:

Closeup of the shelves:

Magic: the Gathering cards, water bottles, dirt, shoes underfoot,  the perpetual tangle of scarves, more filth… we’d basically ignored the vestibule for months hoping it would go away.

Then we decided that damnit, we were going to clean the darn thing!

Out went the shoes! Not pictured: the cobwebs and one live spider inside the boots. (I got A. to clean those; I’m not ok with spiders.) 

I swept the better part of a year’s worth of grime, washed and vacuumed and even wiped down the shelves, which had all of their contents removed and reorganized. 

And then, finally, an hour and a half later: BAM!

Oh yeah. Look at that.

Shoes neatly organized.

Our fedoras and sunhat in a row. (There’s a ballcap and beret hiding under the sunhat.)

And the star of our vestibule, the scarf organizer!

That’s a tension rod over which I threaded all of our scarves—and colour coded them! Gloves and additional scarves that didn’t fit are hiding, neatly laid/folded, underneath. I got the tension rod idea from StorageGeek. SO GOOD.

The board games are there because, uh, we lack storage so we make do with where we can put things. But don’t let the Battlestar Galactica box fool you: all the expansions come in the same size box, and we only use one for the actual game. We play BSG (which takes on average 3 hours) at least once a week.  

That wood thing on the right in the main shots? That’s a wood coat hanger that looks like this:

We love our Nerf swords! (And the suitcase in some of the previous shots holds A.’s ten Nerf laser tag guns. Yeah, that’s right.) 

We also did some other stuff: A. did a bunch of reorganizing in the living room, swept the bathroom floor, I vacuumed—but our basement suite is TINY so none of that took a long time. And I think we followed UFYH’s principles fairly well, even though this was more marathon-y than I’d like: we took breaks. And thanks to UFYH, the kitchen didn’t need any tidying at all, because we’ve been keeping up with it! Ditto on most of the bathroom!

Best part? We both had a lot of fun! We even argued over who got to vacuum, because we both enjoy it so much.