Clean, baby, clean

Things have been in a state of upheaval for a while around here. First, we were sorting through things for the yard sale and storing those items to be sold in the front room. Along the way, we cleared out our one huge storage closet and added shelves in an effort to let the closet function as a storage area AND as a closet once again. Once that project was done, we set about reorganizing the baby’s room to make it more workable as a guest bedroom, now that the guests had somewhere to hang their clothes when they came to visit. Next, we began rearranging the great room, as we call it, the large, multi-purpose room in our house, to take advantage of the fact that we were going to have a working computer/media center in that room and needed to add one more purpose to its already heavy load. In the midst of all this, we’ve cleaned, decluttered, purged, reorganized, tossed, boxed, stored, labeled, moved, donated, and shifted more stuff than I could have imagined we had. We made almost $200 between the yard sale and the kids’ consignment store, and all that was leftover we sent to a church youth yard sale, where they, in turn, made almost $900. So we’ve seen fruit from our labors.

And yet.

And yet, I still feel like we still have too much garbage in every single room. I still can’t find space for everything else we have. I still feel a little overwhelmed by our surroundings. I still feel like we haven’t gotten rid of enough stuff, but I can’t quite decide what else should go. I thought that post yard sale I would feel lighter, perhaps, or at least more in control of our surroundings. But no. Still.

Which leads me to my new goal for the summer: by the time we take our vacation at the end of the summer, I want to have a place for everything and everything in its place. Starting today, I am going to pick out and find a home for or toss/donate five to ten items every day until I feel like we’re back down to a reasonable amount of stuff and our house feels, well, lighter! I’m beginning with overused and heretofore often hidden surfaces, particularly our much beleaguered, constantly cluttered dining table and the never uncovered bookshelf at the foot of our bed. And, most importantly, I am not going to use my office as my get out of jail free space, the place where I put everything that doesn’t have a home until I can figure out what to do with it or forget about it entirely.

So. Today’s items include an old bottle of bubbles on top of the microwave (we opened it and blew some this afternoon), an Every Day Food magazine that’s been circling around for over a month (I went through it and took out those recipes that I could imagine myself making under my actual everyday circumstances--there weren’t many—and tossed it, and three or four stacks of mail that had accumulated in three or four different places (we REALLY need a mail system, but my little destructicons have laid waste to every recycling and mail organization plan I’ve tried so far). Tomorrow I plan to (start to) tackle that bookshelf and start a box for the husband’s papers, which I know will just fill up and then one day disappear, but at least I will have a central place to put them. And I will be checking in here periodically to give myself some sort of marginal accountability. Ooh, ooh, I know, so exciting!