On Sunday, Ben and I tore the upstairs of our house apart and battled against the toys that are threatening to overtake us all.

I don't really have any before picture of the kids' room, but this is the refuse that remained in the hall after we put it back together:

Our room suffered, too, because we were trying desperately to juggle our books around and find more shelf space somewhere because we have no space for more shelves.

We also moved the furniture downstairs and "made" the boys "help" us muck it out. There were several small socks under the couch. Also many chocolately cat cookies.

Harry was gleefully using the central vac to sweep up the behind-the-couch crumbs (his favorite thing to do on Sundays is to move the couch and TV console and see what's fallen behind them) when he sprinted across the room to suck up dust bunnies under the train table. Either those were some bad dust bunnies, or he is a psycho cleaner like me.

Harry and Jack were agitated during the whole cleaning process-- the way zoo animals (maybe higher order primates, but really, I'm thinking more along the lines of bears and maybe giraffes) probably are when their pens are shoveled out and rearranged. They sort of snorted about, sticking their noses into everything and pacing nervously around the room. (sounds like rhinos, come to think of it).

We distracted them with movies and candy so that we could actually toss some stuff out and assemble a bag for Goodwill, as well as a bag to go in the crawl space. Which? Could also use a good purging BECAUSE WE HAVE OUTGROWN THIS HOUSE, DO YOU HEAR THAT HOUSING MARKET? DO YOU??

I took pictures of the end results because we spent a whole day doing it, and I wanted some documentation.

This toybox is just for stuffies,

and this one is for super heroes.

Here's the toy closet when you open the door. We have a bit of room to grow in the huge red bins and on the shelves. But only a very little bit.

Cleaning out the stuffies, who used to hang out in a giant laundry hamper, gave us room for Harry's armchair and a basket of books in one corner of the toy closet

The view from the reading chair

Jack has just started to play with the tool bench in the corner. That's why it's hard to keep our toy closet usable. We have so many big toys and just when Harry has tired of playing with one, Jack falls in love with it.

I like these new bins so far-- they hold a lot of toys, but they don't take up too much room, and they provide some nice flat space on top where we can store big stuff like the pirate ship in the picture. I am not sure how I'll like them after they have been totally dumped over, though.

Cleaning out their closet is NO FUN. I have to go through everything an decide if it is a donation, something to pack away for future offspring (who let's face it, will probably all be boys), or something Jack will grow into. Then, all the soon-to-be Jack clothes go on a bar behind the bottom bar, and I try to hang them up in order, so that the 2T summer stuff, for example, is first in line to move up to his real clothes bar. I don't always remember the back bar, though, which is why jack currently has 26 pairs of pants. Oops. Also why some really adorable stuff (like an argyle cardigan I loved and a whole slew of 18 month attitude tees) never got re-worn. In addition to clothes,newborn crap that we're still hanging on to, sheets and blankets, and old shoes, their closet now holds toys in the red and blue bins because WE HAVE RUN OUT OF ROOM EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THIS HOUSE.

That's it; if we buy one more book-- even a slim Scholastic book order book-- we are screwed.

Despite our best efforts, though, the crap is spiling over into the actual room part of their room.

The chair and basket of books? A big hit with the monkeys.

He doesn't care that his name is not on the chair.