My Journey of Hope: Day 14 of 28 - Before and After

Here is one of the shameful corners of my house. The really silly thing is, it's not even hidden from anyone. It's out in plain sight, but my Lazy Vision sees right past it, multiple times a day. And if I can't see it, it doesn't exist, right?

But today I am faced with an uncomfortable reality. EVERYONE can see it, and it's the first thing people see upon entering my living room. And it's gross. It makes us look like hoarders, or at the very least, crappy housekeepers. We love doing crafts, and sometimes need to pull a lot of items out to do them, but we're really bad about putting it away again. I mean REALLY bad.




This uncomfortable reality is compounded by the knowledge that we are having a new-to-us couch delivered Tuesday evening, and we won't be able to fit it into the living room until I clean this up.

The area between our occasional chairs and the bookshelf is a disaster. When it's dinner time, whatever we've been working on at the table gets stashed there. If we have an item without a home, it gets stashed there. If we intend (see that word? that sometimes means it never gets dealt with) to use it later, it gets stashed there. If we're not quite done with the newspaper, you guessed it - it gets stashed there. And after so long of stashing, rifling through every so often to find what we need, and then stashing again, we are left with an impassable mess.

The area between the kitchen and living room - yuck!

The shameful truth

What's that? You couldn't quite see what exactly is in the pile? Let me help you with that...

The hodge-podge of junk and treasures and garbage

As seen above, there's my gouache paints in the toolbox, white-lidded storage for Hubby's hobby supplies, an interim report for one of the kids, owner's manuals for the BBQs, a big paper cutting guillotine, ribbons, craft paints, and Hubby's leather folder. And that's just what you can see on the surface.

So today's main job was tackling the mess in front of the left bookshelf, as far as the buffet, in order to have enough room to maneuver the old couch out, and the new couch in.There were really two main tasks here: sort all of Hubby's craft stuff into one cohesive pile, and sort through/de-clutter/put away the rest. And here is where we run into trouble: we really don't have sufficient storage space for our crafts, so it's hard to put things away if they never really had a home to begin with! So our garage is experiencing some growing pains while I go through the process of getting our living spaces into the condition I have always wanted. I think the garage will be a summer-long project involving the WHOLE family.

I started by moving as much of Hubby's stuff that I could see on the top layer (yes, there were strata in this mess). Since he has a number of larger items, that made an almost immediate improvement. By the time I got down to the bottom layer, I was finding 5 month old newspapers. Why do I even keep these things? if I don't go through them the day they arrive, I don't go through them at all!

The not so sweet life of a clutterbug family!

Digging deeper, and it looked like this:

About halfway done the area I committed to

By the time I was ready to stop for the day, here's how it looked:

WE HAVE A FLOOR!!!

Okay, that's enough for this post, but stay tuned for Part 2, because that's not all I did that day!