Thursday, December 13, 2012

Cleaning House -- Part 1


So, like I alluded to in my second to last post, I actually did take a crack at emptying my house of stuff. I had two weeks at the beginning of November, and I thought, now, yes, this is my time. I will get rid of half all this stuff that I don’t use...eliminate all that crap that weighs on me.  The smothering mass of stuff in my house will be culled!

Week One:  I was psyched! My friend Keri, of Organize Those Papers,  had created an action plan, a room by room breadown of what I was to do. I was fired up! I was ready to go! And...I was also totally overbooked. 

I could say I booked a series of lunch dates and play dates and errands general time eating up activities because I had been on the road for like, ever before that and I needed to reconnect...but really I think I had subconsciously created a situation where I could avoid the culling. In fact  know I did that because the first week was really more of an exercise in avoidance.

I started out in the dining room, what I felt to be the least offensive part of our house. I mean, it was basically just a table and some random piles of bills and stuff.  It would take me like, 10 minutes to throw away or put away everything there.

Except that everything that was piled up in that room was there for a reason. And the reason was that someone needed to figure out a place to put it. Every piece of paper was there because we had put off deciding what to do with ut...indefinitely. And so it wasn’t so much a matter of throwing things away, or putting things back in their places...it was about finally facing a mountain of decisions that we had been ignoring. For years. I had to find places, decide the fates of papers and posters and pictures and...it was going to take a while. So I started...and then...

Well, I had all the other obligations, and so I put these decisions off for another week. 

(Full disclosure announcement. This post is sponsored by Organize Those Papers)

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