Organizing a teenager bedroom, plus a huge broken mistake!

Guess what! My daughter is officially a teenager now! No more tweening for her. Thirteen will be a good year. It is weird though that I now have two teenagers and zero tweens, kids, toddlers, or babies.

So anyway, I’ve been asking this teen of mine to please clean her room for months now.

Obviously cleaning her room is above her pay-grade. Or maybe it’s her age? Whatever her reason, she just could not get her s**t together enough to get the room clean. You know, typical teen girl messes – clothes everywhere (clean and dirty mixed together all over the place), trash that just could not make it into the garbage can, too many containers of lotions and makeup, art supplies. You get the idea. But she’s so darn cute that it’s hard to be annoyed. 😉

It’s okay though, I still love her to the moon and back. Finally FINALLY one day she actually said to me that she wanted to clean her room. But then she admitted that it was above her head and too overwhelming and would I please help her? I jumped on that so fast and we ran to her room, trash bags in tow.

So we cleaned, and purged, and organized. And we ended up with several bags of trash, stuff to donate, and bags of clothes to give to a friend with a younger daughter.

It was quite the undertaking.

And then tragedy struck. My darling daughter said, “let’s rearrange my room!” And I was like “yaaaaaaaaaaassssssssssss!” and so I grabbed her bookshelf and started moving it to another wall…

You know what happens when you move a very tall bookshelf under a ceiling fan running on high? This happens:

She was like, “Oh no you didn’t” and I was like, “awe crap, oh yes I did”.

The shelf hit the fan and the fan broke it’s arm. And now the fan doesn’t spin anymore. The end. Just kidding, not the end. But basically I broke her new fan that we installed like a year ago… I just looked it up. We installed them last October (per my vlog video), so 8 months ago, and now it’s broken. Oops. My bad. I ordered a new one, so I’ll blog an update post eventually.

Aside from the broken ceiling fan, the girl now has a clean bedroom for the win! We ended up swapping her shelf and desk, but the rest of the furniture stayed in the same place. Which is actually quite comical because in the end, the shelf never even needed to be under the ceiling fan. The broken fan was all for naught. I’ll just laugh because otherwise you can find me rocking in a corner.

And because I’m such a great blogger, we even made her bed… ha. Um, no. Ain’t nobody got time for that. Well, technically I guess I could have made time, but then this blog would all be a lie! I like to keep it real folks, and in my real life, beds usually don’t get made.

And here’s her closet. I took the doors off when we moved in. So, this room is basically a clean version of our “before” pictures. We have BIG plans in here someday. Hopefully someday soon. You want a sneak peek of what we are planning? Okay, I’ll give you a 5-second blurb.

Basically, the closets are getting taken out and one closet will be added where her desk currently is (see above photos). Once these closets are taken out, a door will be added where the right closet currently is which will go into the bathroom. The bathroom is huge so it will be divided in half and the girl will get her own private bathroom with an entrance from her bedroom. Confusing? Once we start the renovation on her room I’ll give you a better update with floorplans and pictures.

YAY! The bedroom is at least clean and de-cluttered. It feels good knowing she isn’t hoarding 30 pounds of trash in there anymore, and there are no clothes left that are too-small. And aren’t these balloons so friggin’ cute? They are from her birthday and we just taped them on her wall. They really compliment her disco ball. Yup, of course she has a disco ball. They are quirky and fun! The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree with this girl. Love it.

So in closing, I’ll leave you with some decluttering tips. When I clean or declutter, I make piles and have trash bags ready. I’ll have a bag for trash, a bag for donate, a bag for clothes to donate, and then I’ll usually have an ikea bag or laundry basket to put stuff in that we are keeping but doesn’t go in the space. After the room is clean, I’ll then take all my full bags and put them where they go. It’s a fool-proof system that works for me. How do you clean and organize? What tips work best for you?

Thanks for reading! Have a wonderful week!

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