Well, of course I incited the organizing/simplifying gods to smite me down when I boldly stated we’d completely finish organizing the house in 3 short months.
We started with a crazy amount of business work (the retail side of the business), then were stuck in with a winter storm, had a bunch of book edits, and now two of our group, including me, have come down with the head cold of the century.
First world problems aside, it’s slowed me down for sure.
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Remember Julie? When said winter storm iced the roads, the sweet thing was here for a while, and wound up spending FOUR nights at our place. After a couple of days of doing the dishes and playing in the snow, we found ourselves sort of staring at each other. I started working on cleaning Ava’s insanely messy room up, but Julie was still pacing. I rattled off a few things that could use doing around here, and…
“Let’s clean out the attic closet!”
Now three thoughts raced through my mind…”Has she seen the closet?”
“Don’t blink, just GO.”
“Whoa, this is gonna be intense.”
So the brave girl and I sat down to clean out 30 or 40 storage tubs of baby clothes, old documents, about 40 old journals of mine, pictures, cords…you name it. The theater closet (not the actual attic), is our “dump zone” for all things we wish to banish out of sight.
Mirrors, old lamps, clothes that don’t fit…it all wound up here for the last 11 years. It’s finally too full to hold anything else, and truly, was I planning to save all of the kids’ clothes until their 18th birthday?? I mean, I will cry a little if we decide to have another baby and have to buy more passies/bottles/jumpers, etc., but really, how long could it stay?
Julie and I both woke up a bit sick the next morning, and we only accomplished a little more work. Same with yesterday. BUT, now we have only four bins left to sort and purge and then, we will be DONE with the worst dumping ground in our home.
If I can tackle this disaster in the first 3 weeks of my plan to finish simplifying our life, then I feel like I can tackle any of it. It was motivating, for sure. I’ll show you what we do with all the empty tubs, but this reveal won’t be so beautiful.
It is most definitely, however, freeing.
Live simply, today, friends.
YAY! for you and Julie, although this is giving me an idea. Have a friend come over right before a huge snow storm and lock her in my attic so she has to clean her way out. Ahem I mean invite a friend over for company prior to huge snow storm with no ulterior motive in mind at ALL. lol
Great job! You are a trend setter. You have motivated me also so I thank you. My list is made and the main floor is 98%complete. We are reaching the stage (or maybe we are already there…) when we should scale down. I keep telling myself, I don’t want my children to have to go through things and remark, “Why would she save this?” Keep movin!
Congrats on tackling a job that no doubt was not much fun. 😉
We are getting the house ready to go on the market and so everything we don’t want to take with us when we move has been slowly piling up in a tiny spare bedroom that almost looks like your photos in this post, except the pathway is much narrower. We live out in the country where we can have ‘burn piles’ out in our field….my wife just wants to take everything from the spare room and burn it LOL.
Nice post on organizing, I’ve been trying to finish that very thing this winter. I pray you’ll be better very soon, God Bless you and yours 🙂
I agree with the above replies. Congrats! But just don’t keep anything. I rarely keep anything. Sell it all, make some money and use it to upgrade the things that you need now!
And give all the rest to people who need them.
I know someone who got rid of all the baby clothes because the doctor told them they couldn’t have another unless they did invetro, the new baby is due in August. We make plans and God laughs.
That’s exactly how I felt when I purged over 150 books from our bookcases. Freer and lighter. Once you get started tossing, it seems you can’t stop. 🙂