Living in a boy's room...

First let me say...yuck. 

I don't know about you, but I just don't even want to look in my oldest son's room. It is truly disgusting. Now I know that there are people out there who only post the beautiful things about their house, and really care about how their house looks every second of the day. That is not me. I try to keep my house picked up, but there are many things that I just don't care about. 

I am not obsessively clean, but we are not filthy either. There are times when I don't wash the dishes for two days, I throw my clothes on the floor, and leave expired food in the fridge. In reality, I do not care about my son's room. 

He is the one who has to live in it. Every few weeks, I go in and tell him to clean it...which consists of him throwing everything in a bin or shoving things in the closet or under the bed. I don't really go in there much because he brings me his dirty laundry and puts away his clean laundry. He puts himself to bed after kissing me goodnight in the living room. He lives in there...not me. 

But I have been dying to get in there and get it cleaned out! Thanks to his total misbehavior this weekend, I was able to do this. 

Without going into details of what he did wrong, his punishment was to have all video games, his tv, toys, books, legos, etc removed from his room for a week. I made him help me. We just took several bags and started chunking stuff. There was so much trash, dirty socks, old wrappers, forks, cups, and just junk in his room and it was amazingly wonderful for me while being agonizing for him. 

He will have to earn only some of these things back. 

Here is what we began with. 

There are a bunch of random cups, clothes, and junk thown on his book case

I can't even try to comment on this

yuck

Yuck.

And here is what we ended up with. 

we kept this because it plays music that helps him get to sleep

empty bookcase

cleaned up the desk and under the bed

no toys in this room

He feels totally punished and I feel so much better having that room cleaned out!!!

And here are the massive numbers of trash bags full of junk...

Incidently, house cleaning has taken a back seat to school work and spending time with my kids when I am not doing school work. It is paying off, because that test I was so worried about last week???  I got the highest score....108! Only 3 more weeks!!!