No, this does not mean I put my daughter in the Give Away, Throw Away, or Put Away bin. But I did declutter her room! Well, I still need to do the top shelf in the closet, but aside from that, I decluttered her room!
The key was asking her while she was playing Martha Speaks games on pbskids.org if she wanted to help me or if she wanted me to declutter her room by myself. She asked me to spare one craft (a fish kite she’d made at the art festival this summer), but everything else she seems totally fine with me putting in the Give Away and Throw Away bins. Of course, she’s not looked that closely, or I’m sure she’d find reasons to keep most of the stuff that I’m doing away with, but I’ll do my best to keep that from happening.
I’m not going about this decluttering thing all that systematically, which is probably going to come back to bite me, but so far, I think it’s working out OK to kind of bounce from room to room. I don’t think it’s possible to take each room as an isolated section of the house. If I declutter the kitchen, I have room to move things in there that I’ve been storing in the dining room. Then I move those things out of the buffet thing and have room for art supplies where the foodstuffs used to be. It’s haphazard, but I think that as long as I carry through on my commitment to do the entire house over the course of the month, I should be OK.
I realize now that I should have taken “before” pictures to document my progress. Oh, well. I know what it looked like before. (And frankly, it looks even worse during, what with all the taking stuff out of closets I’ve been doing. I have hope that the “after” will be worth the effort. I’m SO glad we don’t have a basement. And that my mom will be here to help me with the garage. Well, that’s not the reason she’s visiting, but that’s one of the things she’s going to help me with while she’s here. Don’t worry; she likes that kind of thing.)
Imperfect Happiness 