Simplifying...

What an amazing start to the New Year

I have had…it has truly been life changing.
Wow!

While my week had several turns that I hadn’t anticipated, it is wonderful and one of my favorite quotes by Thoreau is finally going to become a reality!:

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.

Live the life you have imagined”
 
Christmas 2010…

since I work with so many college students who wanted to go home out of the state for Christmas, I decided that the way the holidays fell, it meant I would have a 4 day weekend and then a 3 day weekend and so I decided to take the first week of January off so I could try and get more order to my clutter-filled life.

During the Christmas break I re-read (here)

“It’s all TOO much” by Peter Walsh …

I absolutely love this book.

It’s such a fun read and makes me laugh around every page. Re-reading this book got me on a roller coaster that is going to have our home pared down to have “exactly” what we need and not any more.

Love the quote in his book by William Morris:

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know
to be useful or believe to be beautiful”.

Peter Walsh is SO spot on with everything he says and I especially like what he says about the Master Bedroom…

”The bedroom furniture and your clothes can stay…all else goes…you heard me; your bedroom furniture and clothes, that’s it”!!

So happy, that our Master bedroom has never been filled with unnecessary clutter, although I know many people that have anything and everything stored in their master bedroom.

That is the one room in my home that never has been burdened with this.

Having one week off from work,

I got to send my men out the door each morning. Ethan is such a clock watcher and is meticulous about how he spends his time and making sure he makes it to the bus on time. (he takes after his mom in this way)

I had to snap a few photos of him running out the door one of the mornings I was home.

LOVED these special moments!!
 

The first day of my vacation

was spent completely deep cleaning our master bedroom (including heave-hoeing both mattresses off the bed by myself) and vacuuming the years worth of dust bunnies that were hiding under the bed and behind all of the bedroom furniture.

Baseboards were cleaned, edges of the carpet vacuumed, windows/window sills cleaned…everything neatly folded and organized in our closet and dresser. 

We also sent on a large garbage bag full of clothes/shoes to our local charity. Our room is perfectly clean and sparkling is what it is!! The master bedroom is the most important room in the house and I was so happy to give this room my first priority on my time off!

Miracles do happen…

I had Christmas taken down and all neatly put away by January 5th. That is a major accomplishment as my Christmas usually doesn’t get taken down until my visiting teachers stop by towards the end of the month. (we’ve even had years that our Christmas has been up until February).

I LOVE walking in my home and seeing order in our living room and not seeing remnants of Christmas in January. Since our living room doesn’t get used much, it is easy to let Christmas stay up longer than normal.

*******************

“It’s all too much”

is truly one of my favorite books as Peter Walsh knows humans so well and knows all of the excuses we will have when we start to “de-clutter” our lives.

I decided, we are not going to buy any more hangers for our clothing,

I am not going to just “re-organize” everything we have in a different way.

I wanted to make a drastic change

and actually pare down our life to LESS…

"Less is More” is our motto

and while we have got a plan and are on the fast track to becoming debt free, we have been drowning in clutter and too much stuff!

We want to have a manageable life that is not weighed down by stuff.

We want true Freedom and true Freedom comes from not being burdened down by clutter or debt.

We want a life that once our goal of being debt-free is realized that we could pare down to a smaller space and be content with life because we have been SO used to living with less and being content with small spaces.

When our kids are grown Tracy and I want to travel and truly see and experience this wonderful world that we live in.

Having too much stuff, prevents us from being able to make our goals become a reality!

We sent on five pick-up truck loads of really nice furniture, clothes, treadmill, exercise equipment/gadgets, nice decorations, craft projects, lamps, bumper-pool table, giant old TV (in perfect working order) and circa 1992 entertainment cabinet, writing desk and end table that Tracy made while I was pregnant with Jade,etc... to our local Charity (Deseret Industries) and two pick-up truck loads of trash (mostly paper) to dump/recycling bins.

WOW and we still have a ways to go, but it feels SO good to let go of things…

”Let go of the old to make room

for new and exciting things"!
 

For Christmas

Tracy purchased the following books for us to read:

“Little House on a Small Planet” (here)

and

“Living Large in Small Spaces”. (here)

I very much love these books and I can’t wait to have time to finish them...truly life changing books.  
While Tracy and I have always romanticized the idea of “cozy/small spaces” and have been trying to commune with the idea of “Small space living” for the past few years, it has really been the past six months, that we have been intrigued beyond measure by the idea of living MORE in LESS space. 

Thus our love for the following Blog 
http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/

(so many great ideas and plenty of eye candy on this blog)

I learned more than ever this past week

that our house is WAY too big!

While our main level is 1500 square feet, since we have an unfinished basement (except for our food storage room), our basement has been a “catch all” for extra furniture, PILES and PILES of paperwork that I haven’t had time to deal with that just gets piled down there

Tracy is always amazed

at how I can “Stage” our house to look perfect and clutter free when company comes, but that also means, that the piles got moved to someplace else…

out of sight, out of mind. 
Tomorrow just never seemed to come…

until January 6th…

I decided I was going to tackle this head on, SO,

I moved every single pile of paper in my house...

and dumped it on the kitchen counter, kitchen table, area rug and love seat.

I wanted to know what I was dealing with and didn’t want to hide my head in the sand anymore. I figured that if I just pulled one pile at a time up from the basement that I would probably not get things organized and one day would roll into the next, like it has done for the past 10 years.

I sorted everything into piles according to category, took all of my organizing bins and sorters to a different room (so I wouldn’t be tempted to fill the containers, just because I had them) and then started the painful process of deciding what to keep, what to throw out, etc….
Since moving our kids into the smaller bedroom and making an actual TV/media room last Spring, we have finally decided to move our main computer out into our kitchen area (right now this has been where Tracy’s computer has been and I have had my computer in the TV Room). We are then going to make a docking station where he can keep and use his lap top.
We are going to treat our computer/office like they would on Apartment Therapy and scale our life down to having everything we could possibility need (except our food storage) organized on our main level (we will eventually make a room to be creative in the basement), but first things first.

Can’t wait to commune with LESS,

so I can truly have MORE!

No more wasting time trying to figure out what “pile” that item I need to find is located in.

No more being disorganized with things that I am late in getting birthday cards off to people that I love and care about.

Join me on my Journey to de-cluttering

and getting ORDER to my home once and for all!

From now until I am done, I will be doing a regular posts, showing our progress and the creative ways we are dealing with our space.

Also, more recipes and posts showing our family events coming as well! De-cluttering my life and getting order will truly bring Freedom to my life and give me more TIME to spend on the things that really matter in my life;

family, friends and hobbies!

Happy January, Happy 2011

and Happy Simplifying my life!!