Spring cleaning...in the winter...Nesting?

About a year and three months ago, we moved from our first little apartment into the apartment that we're in now.  Our first apartment was about 450 square feet, so when we moved into a 900 square foot apartment, we were THRILLED with how much room we had!  When we moved in, it felt like we were never going to have enough stuff to fill up the apartment.

Boy was I wrong.

A couple weeks ago I looked around and realized, "Holy crap...we have to fit another person in here in four months.  He may be little, but he's sure going to come with a lot of STUFF!  I have no idea what we're going to do!"

To chalk it up to that realization, or to blame "nesting," I'm not really sure, but what I do know is that this week I have been on a cleaning adventure.  And it hasn't been just the normal "vacuum the living room" or "dust the speakers."  No.  I'm talking like "completely cleaning off the half wall between our kitchen that's become so cluttered with random papers and stuff that doesn't belong to us" kind of cleaning.  The deep, decluttering kind of cleaning.  I finally looked at all of the papers we've been holding onto (for what reason, I'm not quite sure) and either put them in the "trash" pile or the "shred" pile.  I've got piles going of random stuff of other people's that we've collected throughout the last year that I'm finally going to give back.

I have to say though, getting through all the clutter makes me kind of happy.  It makes me kind of happy to look over at the table that our birds sit on, and realize that I not only organized it, but finally cleaned everything off, got rid of whatever had collected there that we don't need, and vacuumed up all the bird feathers and seed that had fallen all over the place. (You would not believe the amount of feathers that two little parakeets lose, and the amount of seed that they manage to get in the smallest of cracks).

Hopefully over the next four months we can keep it up so that when little man comes, he gets to come home to a nice, organized, clean home :)

What are some of your favorite cleaning and organizing tips?