Controling The Clutter

Ever since I started being a stay-at-home Mommy, I have felt like our house is closing in on me and is not as clean as I would like it to be. I am sure this is brought on by the fact that I am now spending all (if not most) of my time at home and have become acutely aware of how small our living space is. I know I pretend to be a neat freak, but the reality of it is: our house is definitely lacking in some key areas of cleanliness. I am very good at picking up "stuff" and putting things away, but it always leads to overstuffed closets and dust bunnies behind the furniture. My goals were: to weed out the closets, give the house a deep cleaning, and begin utilize our small space more effectively. Once that was done, I promised myself that I would keep the house generally picked up and choose one room a day for a good cleaning. That way the house was always looks semi-presentable and I wouldn't be killing myself having to clean the whole house in a day. Three months later......I have started to make good on my promise. And the best part is that we are having a yard sale to try to make some money before everything gets donated to Goodwill. We are going to sell some stuff on-line, but most it will be going directly to the yard sale. I have already decided to use whatever profits we make to buy ourselves a leather recliner for the living room. We really need a nice comfy chair that will hold up for a while. I keep telling myself that we need a bigger house with more space and then the problem would be solved. The fact of the matter is that we do need a bigger house, but it isn't happening for a while. So in the meantime, I need to make better use of the space we have and it starts by clearing out a whole lotta stuff that someone else can use. Honestly, as I go through the stuff, I kinda feel like a hoarder. I mean, who knew we had so much junk? I have cleaned Owen's room and gone through the closet in his room. It was literally spilling over with stuff and sometimes the door wouldn't even shut! I have also gone through most of the living room (VHS tapes, really?) and Jason has started working on the laundry room. Everything that is yard-sale-able has been priced and boxed up. We still have tons of work to do in the bedroom, kitchen, laundry room, and shed. It's starting to feel like we're making progress and that feels nice. Don't forget that one man's trash is another man's treasure and come see us on August 8th!