Clean Sweep

There have been a lot of blog posts and tweets recently about home organization and
paring down, and I realized that I’d been tweeting about it, but hadn’t written a blog post. I’ve had a goal to tackle one room a month this year and really clean and organize it, and get rid of junk that we just don’t use or don’t need. That plan worked well until the summer, when traveling and work got the better of me. But two weeks ago, I kicked it into high gear. Even before that, I’d been reading “One Year to an Organized Life,” which was an okay book, but a little too much zen for my tastes – You deserve to live in an organized home that brings you peace and joy . . . (my paraphrase), blah, blah, blah. Whatever. Then I read Peter Walsh’s book, “It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff.”
This book was excellent, but what really jumped out at me was his thought that our possessions are trapping us – we’re either living in the past holding onto the stuff because of the memories associated with them, or we’re living in the future because we might need it or it might fit someday. But we’re not living in the present, and our belongings should be for the life we want and have now. After reading this, I was ready to go back to my one room a month plan, which was helped immensely by the flooded basement in May, but then two weeks ago we had the catalyst event.
Robert went to get a sweater out of his closet, and his closet rod fell, crashing all of his clothes to the floor. I convinced him that since this wasn’t the first time this had happened, he should swap closets and use the guest room closet (no, our bedroom closet isn’t big enough for both of us – yet). But that meant that I had to clear out the guest room closet, which led to clearing out the dresser so we could swap those, which led to clearing out the small desk in the guest room so Robert could use it as a place to keep his laptop and charging station. It’s nice to have a designated guest room, but it’s only used when Michelle comes to visit from Alaska, or Lisa housesits for us, so we reclaimed the space. But that meant that the other bedroom, which is like my office, got completely overhauled, too. The closet was cleaned and organized, the dresser, and my desk, and then we brought up the filing cabinet that had stayed in the basement when our office was downstairs (pre-flood).
We’d also been going through our kitchen and pulling out stuff we didn’t use – why on earth did I need a Pampered Chef grapefruit knife? – I don’t even like grapefruit – and we also completely reorganized our cabinets, making them more functional. This led me to attack the living room, the linen closet, and our bedroom, including my closet and armoire. The bathrooms are next, but they’re already in pretty good shape since we’d done the remodeling projects.
All in all, we donated about 30 boxes of stuff we didn’t need or use to a family that was having a Dave Ramsey garage sale to raise money to get out of debt, and 5 giant trash bags of clothing to the Council of the Blind for their store (this was a tax deduction). The basement is in pretty good shape already, again, the flood really turned out to be a blessing, and we’ll make another go-through to see what we can part with (which won’t include any knitting/yarn stuff, but I may pare down my scrapbooking and rubber stamping supplies). We’ll hit the garage in the spring, and be done, although we’re never really done because you have to stay on top of it.
The best part is that we are both really conscious of not buying stuff on a whim, which not only reduces clutter, but saves money, too. Just because we have 3,460 square feet of living space doesn’t mean it has to be filled up. In fact, I think I’d much rather have my life be full, rather than my home.