My first "job"...

So, when I first started thinking of becoming an organizer, I was well into my first gig.  For some reason, though, I decided to take pictures.
As you can see, they weren't really specific, but nothing in that room was.  My buddy had just moved (apparently by dumping everything into a box and then moving that box and then dumping the box out).  I'm fairly certain I took the picture just to prove to my husband what I had done all day.

So, we began by scooting everything aside and creating little boxes (shoebox size) of all the different toys.  This is why is super important to have the client with me when I work.  I wasn't able to tell that a miniature fork went with one thing while a plastic (is that something) sword went with something else.  So we sorted and sorted and sorted... in the end we had some 50 boxes.  (This is the day I fell in love with the latch boxes from Sterlite... you can find these at Walmart.)

The second thing we did was get rid of all the extra stuff.  (Something that should have been done before they moved.)  There were baby toys (and she didn't have anything close to a baby) and toddler girl stuff (she didn't have one of those either) and broken stuff (beyond repair...).



Now this buddy of mine had a brand spanking new house built by David Weekly with a GREAT closet for the game room.  As you can see from this before shot - she was using it willy-nilly with nothing really organized.

We cleaned that puppy out and found all kinds of other nick-nacks that didn't belong in there.













That's when the magic started... we started filling up those shelves in an organized way - keeping all the youngest child's toys on the bottom (she has three kids - boy, girl, boy) and designating spots for everything else.  We labeled things for a garage sale, and put donations right in the car for immediate drop off.  No excuses and no regrets.  :-)

There was a plan, too, to make sure all the games/toys were being played with.  We put a post it note on the inside of all those buckets.  Everytime the kids played with a game, they could remove the post it note if it was still there.  Six months later, she went back and got rid (donated) all the toys that still had their post it notes.

As for the room... it's now a functioning room with plenty of space to get out and play... there is a designated section for television and video games, a section for art, and a section to get together and play one of those board games.