Necessary, but boring sewing

As much as I don't want to spend my precious child free days doing something boring like cleaning, there's no denying how much can get done when there aren't little people around wanting attention or worse, undoing what you've already done.  But with us planning to sell our house later this year it must be done, so I've decided to dedicate one day a week to clean a room each week.  Ah the joys of being a grown up with responsibilities!

A few weeks ago I decided to organise the bathroom, which I've only just finished because I sort of flagged halfway through and really had to force myself to go on.  It's unbelievable how much clutter can accumulate in such a small bathroom.  I threw out two large garbage bags of empty and nearly empty bottles of toiletries, old and well past it cosmetics and moved some less than fluffy towels into the laundry for dog washing duties. A trip to Ikea and Howards Storage World for some little boxes and containers and a frenzied session with my label maker has mostly corralled all of the bits and pieces in there.  I also managed to incorporate some sewing into the bathroom declutter, although it's just pretty boring but useful.

When we bought our house 10 long years ago now, the bathroom was original meaning it was about 50 years old with the only work done on it comprising a toilet squeezed in sometime in the past to replace the outdoor loo.  It was teeny tiny, literally the length of a bathtub, there was no storage and it looked dirty all the time no matter how much I cleaned it.  And it was all shades of green, with a lovely view of a fence and our neighbour's house through a poky window:

We rearranged some bedroom doors that were adjacent to the bathroom door in a foyer area so we could use the foyer area to make the bathroom bigger, and then we totally gutted the bathroom to come up with this:

One of the best things we did was to build a huge linen cupboard which you can see in the photo above (so that we had enough room to accumulate all that clutter of course!).  My husband built a slide out rack to hang some laundry bags from in the bottom half of the cupboard, all that was needed was for me to sew some laundry bags.  We did that bathroom renovation in 2005 or 2006, and I'm ashamed to admit that I only just sewed those laundry bags today.  I have no reasonable excuse or explanation, just pure procrastination mixed with laziness!  It seriously took me only a couple of hours to make these so I don't know why I didn't make them earlier.

Before: big jumbled mess with mounds of washing, a foot spa and some bath toys shoved in there out of sight.

After: well organised and pretty space, but still the same mounds of washing though!

still haven't removed the price tag stickers off those doors yet either!

They are literally just some square bags sewn from some bleached calico which I happened to have in the stash, and I used iron on transfer paper to put those 'light' and 'dark' labels on the front.  I used some snaps on the tabs that wrap around the pull out timber frame so that I can take the full bag from the bathroom and out to the laundry on wash day (which these days seems like it's every day).

Anna is so interested in the new laundry bags that she is actually going hunting through the house for dirty laundry to put in them, although she does have to check with me on each item which side to put it in.  Her dad is still pretty bad at putting his washing in the correct bag (seriously how hard is it to tell what is light or dark), so I shouldn't be too hard on Anna I guess!

Checking my calendar today I'm quite dismayed to see I only have two weeks before I'm back at work. Time certainly flies when you're having fun, especially so when you're trying to cram lots of things in each day.  Plus my husband has been travelling a bit for work lately so I've been doing some solo parenting which is hugely time consuming not to mention tiring.  He's off this weekend to the F1 Grand Prix in Melbourne for a boys weekend away (well more than that - Thursday to Monday) so I'm planning on getting plenty of me time next weekend to make up for it!