Spring Cleaning: Out With the Old and In With the New Thanks to Colgate #CBias #EasterSmiles

Living with all guys can be, well, messy. So now that warm weather is on the way and Easter is over, it was time to clean out some of the junk and create a clean environment- starting with the boy’s bathroom! I wanted to get the kids excited about Spring Cleaning but sometimes that can be a little difficult. You say cleaning in general to a 9 year old boy and he takes of running in the other direction! But it had to be done. His bathroom drawers were really scary. So, I made up my mind, got a game plan and was ready to take on the dreaded bathroom of J-Man!

To start with, we needed to replace some of the things that had taken up residence in the scary drawers. Like, say, his toothbrushes that had solidified due to toothpaste being left on them. Or the rolls of toothpaste that were so sticky and gunky that I was scared to pick them up without gloves on. And while I know I could have thrown those things out prior to replacing them, I wanted J-Man to be a part of that wonderful experience so that it would stick with him! So we headed off to get a few things to start our project. As soon as we arrived at Walmart, we looked for a new toothbrush. We were able to easily locate the Colgate SpongeBob Squarepants and Dora the Explorer toothbrushes. After all, what kid is not going to get excited about those two characters! If I had a penny for every time I’ve heard SpongeBob’s crazy laugh….I digress though. Back to the toothbrushes. We found a great selection and J-man was excited about picking out a new one (no, I still hadn’t told him the old ones were going bye-bye).

And of course when you have a SpongeBob toothbrush, you have to find the matching toothpaste (you’ll see how big I am on matching shortly)…

And then we headed off to find an vital part of the Spring Cleaning project: contact paper. Because any mom of a pre-teen boy knows that they are incapable of keeping things neat and clean. So, my reasoning is this - if we put contact paper down in the bottom of the drawer, it will catch the stray toothpaste and who knows what else and then every few month I can pull it out and replace it! No more scrubbing bathroom drawers cause, honestly, that just not fun!

Armed with our supplies, we were ready to head home and attack every mom’s worst nightmare - a boy’s bathroom!

To start with, I wanted to make sure J-Man was involved in this. Whether it was simply by holding the trash bag or by actually throwing some of the items away, I was determined that this was going to be a group activity (i.e. not mom doing it with him watching). I explained before we went upstairs that we were going to get rid of pretty much everything - old medicines, gross toothbrushes, old toothpaste and more. And to make it more manageable, we divided it into two steps.

Step 1: Throw Away and Clean

Step 2: Put in Contact Paper and Organize New Items

Easy, peasy right? Well, not when this is what you’re starting with!

But, hey, I’m a mom - I’ve seen worse. So there was little else to do but dive in! We tossed all the old items. After all, who needs 3 {empty} four year old bottles of sunscreen? We had a lot to throw out and after getting everything out of the drawer, I saw they they definitely needed to be wiped down! Even with putting the new contact paper in, I didn’t want grossness underneath! J-Man was a huge help and threw out all the products he was told to! And he even did it happily when he started to see that his drawers were starting to look like actual bathroom drawers instead of just junk drawers!

And after lots of tossing, a little scrubbing and a lot of throwing away, this is what we were left with (get ready to gasp because it’s super impressive):

See, I told you it was all matchy-matchy but we had all the rest of the SpongeBob items already - they were just hiding under all the junk! And now, J-Man has a bathroom drawer that is clean, organized and ready for Spring! The entire project allowed us to work together towards an end goal and get rid of old items that were no longer needed in order to create a fresh start for him going forward! And in this mama’s mind, it was a huge success!

To find out more about the great Colgate products we used in our Spring Cleaning Bathroom makeover, be sure to visit the Colgate Facebook and Twitter pages. And check out our entire super fun shopping trip that helped make this makeover a reality in our Google+ album. Hopefully, our little experiement in Spring Cleaning will get you well on your way to being out with the old and in with the new!

This shop has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias. #CBias Regardless, all opinions are 100% my own.