Yesterday,  I decided that I really had to tackle cleaning out my (super sloppy) college-aged daughter's room.  When she left for school, I told her it had to be 'guest ready ' before she got in the car to leave.  Clearly, our definitions differ.  She is coming home for the weekend and I wanted to, 1) get all the junk out of there before she brought more junk home, 2) show her EXACTLY what I mean by guest ready.

Cleaning out is really just about digging in and dealing with stuff you would rather not deal with.  Honestly, I could start a small school with the amount of discarded school supplies I found in her room. I guess I should have known they were in there somewhere since every year she was the only one of my kids who was never able to reuse any supplies from the previous year.  Now I understand why...she would have had to find them first. I just figured that she lost everything (which I guess is, technically, true).

The best thing I found was a water bottle from her middle school basketball tournament (identified with fabric paint on the neoprene cover) still filled with water.  As we all know, once a child gets to high school they never again touch anything that smacks of middle school.  For that reason, I can be sure that the water that was still in the water bottle was circa 2004....lovely. And all this time I thought she left on her shelf because she had happy memories of her basketball tournament!  I guess she just couldn't be bothered to take it down to the kitchen and wash it out!

I finally got everything out of there, hauled all the trash to the outside can and ran the vacuum.  It looks great!

Of course, she comes home tomorrow. I  will enjoy 24 hours of her room being up to the standards of the rest of the house...and then I will clean it up again when she leaves on Monday (of course, I won't tell her that).  It is a small price to pay for having her home. 

Someday, she will figure out that it is easier to keep it neat than to have to go in and wrestle back control--I can only hope!