I’ve been needing to get my house in order for awhile and have finally come to a point that I am ready to do it! I am a high school English teacher and am finishing up my 16th year of teaching, I have two children ~ an 18 year old daughter, who is home after her first year of college, and a 16 year old son, my husband and I will be celebrating our 20th anniversary in July AND we have three dogs and a cat (all indoors) – pet hair is my ENEMY. It is also important to note that we built our house in September 2004. We have had almost 15 years to shove stuff into every nook and cranny. Our biggest issue is storage. We don’t have much extra closet space. We don’t even have an entry way/coat closet. This tends to lead to us creating places to keep things, we also aren’t good about using our attic space. Neither my husband or I are too comfortable with carrying things up and down the attic ladder. This has now lead to our garage being used to store all the left over randomness…Christmas tree and ornaments, lawn equipment, and many other things that should be taken to a trash bin. We entertain friends quite often, especially during football season, so we have gotten pretty good at hiding the clutter. We have shoved A LOT of things in cabinets and behind closed doors. For the most part, people can’t tell just how much crap we have stashed away.
Purging, decluttering, organizating, decrapifying (whatever word you prefer) my home is my summer project! I have read the book Decluttering at the Speed of Life by Dana K. White (available at http://www.amazon.com for $9.98) and have been reading some popular blogs (www.konmari.com) and I think I have found a system that will work for me. I totally agree that everything needs to be pulled out, touched, and evaluated although I don’t know that I will be thanking each thing I trash or donate for their service…sorry Marie. I also don’t know if I’ll stick to the all visible mess first…I kind of want to go room by room, but we’ll see once I get started.
I am one that has a hard time giving away things that I feel hold monetary value. I tell myself that I will save it until I can get it on ebay or a local varage sale page. The problem is then that those things usually just end up in a big pile, stuffed in a cabinet, or in the back of my closet. Ebay is useful and I’ve been able to make some decent pocket change selling my kids gently used clothes and other things on there but it does take time and then after buying mailers and postage I may make a few bucks. I don’t know that it’s worth it so I am going to try very hard to take Dana White’s advice and donate or trash EVERYTHING versus hang on to the hope to make $20. My goal this summer is to get rid of the crap and then once the house is under control maybe I can look at doing some of that in the future. My goal is to create “homes” for things so that it makes things easy to find and know where to return. I am using baskets and Sterilite containers (available in tons of different shapes and sizes at Wal-Mart or Target) for this. If I get on a roll I may use my Cricut machine to cut out labels for certain “homes”. My biggest challenge will be getting my husband and son to get in the habit of returning things to their place. My daughter will love this system once it’s in place.
I will be posting before and after pictures here and discussing what worked and what didn’t. Wish me luck!!!!
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