i need inspiration to get my home in order...

[ILoveItWhenYouCallMeBoo]

link some pictures of stunning homes to get me motivated. plllleeeeeeeeeeeaaaaseeee!!!!

can send you pics of my foetid squalid hovel, more horrible warning than aspirational though

Hmm, well, it looks like it's the best offer I'm going to get tonight

are you talking tidying, or decorating?

tidying but i need to see those clean lines and beautiful homes to have the imagery for what i am aiming for. it sounds silly doesn't it?

Doesn't sound silly to me! Watching with interest.....

I've joining the thread - I'm just despairing of ever keeping tidy for more than a few minutes.

sounds like you need a good chuck out first of all

its hard to keep tonnes of crap tidy

I like the apartment therapy website. Is v american but lots of pics of real homes...

yep, the chuck out is in progress this week. playroom done today. my room and boys room tomorrow.

In our house it's the kids' tonnes of crap though. They don't want to throw anything out. And instead of DH's relatives buying them ONE xmas present each, they think that quantity is better than quality and buy them a small pile of absolute tat eg box games that nobody's ever heard of that cost 3 quid in Tescos and hold their attention for 5 mins. I want to chuck it straight away but I can't, can I?

(sorry, OP, slight hijack of your thread, but I feel your pain!)

ILove, how did you go about your playroom chuck out?

i am secretly throwing toys out at every chance i get, stuff they forget they own. just putting a few in to the binbag as i am taking rubbish out or putting them in a box in my room for charity shop.

well, i literally knelt down at at the door with a plastic bag and worked my way into the room putting all rubbish and broken toys in it. as i went along i sorted as many of the same things (lego, building blocks, cars, trainset) together in their own piles and as i found the containers i put them all in. the rubbish and broken toys are all gone and all the right stuff is in the right container, i just need to do the floor and the re-arrange everything so it is accesible by dcs and neat. at the minute the boxes are just sitting there. i think i will try and get some storage for it all though.

When I'm clearing DD's toys anything broken gets chucked, everything else gets put away in a cupboard where she can't see them and if she doesn't ask for them within a month or two they go to the charity shop. She's 4 and i've been doing this for about a year (gps buy her lots of stuff) and she has never once asked for anything i've put away.

i have a rule (well i had and I'm re-instating it) that any toys that aren't part of a set or cannot be grouped gets 'lost'. so anything from mcdonalds happy meals, anything free from magazines, any singular thing that just doesn't belong with anything else gets binned or charity shopped.

singular toy cars are fine because they just join the box of cars.

I like that rule, ILoveIt! I think you've inspired me to have a good sort out of our playroom. Must get stuck in tomorrow...it's the guilt of chucking things out, though, that gets to me.