Wrap it up

Happy 2012!  

getting serious over his first candy cane

While we were pretty darn lazy over our almost 10 days total of no work/time to together, we did manage a great trip to Los Angeles to visit my fam for x-mas as well a bit o' clean up around the casa.  Steve decided to take on vacuuming out the entire attic area just after I finished packing up the Christmas decor.  and boy did it need it! 

gorgeous sunny LA

And of course, he then tackled the other two attic spaces we have.  Which of course set me off on realizing what a beautiful disaster of stuff we had stuffed in the attic. 

We pulled out some old crap that is not even worthy of Goodwill, 9 GIANT file boxes of Steve's dad's old files that now can be shredded since it's been 10 years (he was an attorney for people with disabilities so we had to keep 'em but are so glad to see them go-we started off with probably over 30 file boxes 4 years ago), and, of course, don't forget the worthless box of baseball cards from Steve's childhood that Steve is finally ready to give over to Goodwill.  Next, working on him giving up his Garfield collection.  I told him he could keep one.  He already let me sell all the Garfield books to Powells-and we made enough to buy him a couple pairs of socks from there (naturally, I put them in his stocking).  I parted with all but four (of 13-I know, excessive) of my Cabbage Patch Kids and found out that Oxy Clean is awesome at removing 25 year old dirt stains.

But I did come across my baby memory box and pulled out a cool plush carrot.  Inside, there is a  plush bunny family that my grandma made for me almost 30 years ago-still in perfect condition and Ben loves it!  Also, found a picture (the kind that looks metal-ish-can't think of what they are called right now) from 1925 of my grandma and her family that I hope to frame soon.

Anywho, onto the real project...organizing the two tons of wrapping paper, ribbon and tissue that we had.

yup, that's allll wrapping supplies

I have been meaning to do this for awhile but saved it for when Steve was traveling.  I wanted to be able to organize while catching up on juicy trash shows on TLC and avoid having Steve make fun of my episode choice the whole time. 

an old theatre trunk

My friend Sarah told me that she used a storage trunk to organize all of her wrapping supplies. 
Steve and I picked up the beauty to use as our coffee table (now used as our side table) several years back at an estate sale for $50.  And I love it. 

all decorated & personalized; it also has that old musty smell, not bad, just old

I think it belonged to John, a dancing comedian!

So after several hours of rotting my brain while catching up on Hoarders and the Kardashians, I was all set and ready to load up the trunk with all of my non-Christmas supplies.  I even color coded the tissue into one ziplock! 

the top portion has the ribbon & boxes & some super cool old fabric

the bottom section holds the tissue (note that color coding-boo-ya), bags and wrap paper

It feels so great to be getting organized and more cleared out in prep for the kitchen/stair remodel.
Tonight I wrangled all the Christmas supplies into one big box and plan to leave that in the attic. 

And this is funny because I think that the pic below is the best we got of the three of us while we were at my parents, cross your fingers my sister got some better ones with her nice camera.