Carla's Low Spend Challenge - February Edition

Carla's back with another challenge.  You can read the details here, and it is not too late to sign up.  I've decided to do both parts, low spending and decluttering.

For Low Spending, I'm going to cut my household budget by 17% by (a) continuing to buy only essentials and (b) figure out what is going on with our phones.  We had 3 phone charges last month, and we've only got two phones.  I am seriously considering dropping our land line and going to cable; it wouldn't work in a hurricane, but I'll be down the road in a more secure house if I have to ride out a hurricane anyway.  I hate AT&T; their bills are impossible to read and they are always screwing stuff up, and we live so far out in the country that we have no other choice in either land or cell service.  I'm going to sock away the extra money toward repaying my parents at the end of the year.

For decluttering, my four challenges will be as follows:

(1) Personal Space - clean out the bedroom.  It's become rather a catch-all area since the babies were born, and I need to get it back into working order.  Also, I need to set up a better system for nighttime handgun storage, so that my firearms are easily accessible to me, and not accessible to rug rats.

(2) Family Space - Re-organize baby clothing.  I've received a ton of baby clothing as gifts, really so much that I don't use much of it.  I need to purge the ones they have outgrown and organize the new ones into weight categories so that they are easy to rotate in.  I also need to organize the old clothing into goodwill, giveaway for girl baby, and giveaway for boy baby, so that I can be prepared to give my nicer stuff to a couple I know that will need it, as soon as they know their baby's gender.

(3) Productive Challenge - I need to re-organize my kitchen.  The household chemicals need to go somewhere not easily accessed by babies, and my shelf for wine glasses needs to be replaced with a better system.  I don't know if I can get it all done in a week, but I can certainly get it all planned.

(4) Dreaded Challenge - Go through all the paperwork in the house and answer it, file it, or get rid of it.  I have piles that have been waiting for my attention since I was pregnant; I know there can't be anything important in there, or it would already have started to smell, but I need to get the stacks out of my path.  This is mostly concentrated around my computer area.

As a personal thing, I am going to start Flylady's baby steps again.  I'm not sure if this is the fourth or fifth time, but I keep trying to get the habits ingrained, since I can see that they work if I can just stick with them.