Of Pauses and Progress...........

Well the purging has stymied for now. The two closets I want to tackle next I need the lovely husband’s help with. But until he has time to help (he works a ton of hours during the week) I will be working on smaller projects around the house.

The first one is organizing my recipes. Over the years I have collected many cookbooks but also loose paper type of recipes. The cookbooks are fine; they have a nice little home on my kitchen counter in a corner. It is the loose paper ones that are spilling out everywhere, adding to our paper problem, and just making my cookbook area look untidy. I have wanted to do a recipe card box for a while but didn’t want to do just plain 3x5 cards; it’s just a thing with me that everything has to be girly and cute if I can make it that way. The other day I went to Michael’s craft store to just look around and happened to find these really cute, completely kitsch recipe cards. I found these in the $1 bins; there is also a recipe card box that I will be going back for. So now I am sorting though all of the loose paper recipes to make sure that I don’t have doubles and then will be hand writing them onto these cards. So instead of stacks of paper on top of my cookbooks I will have a cute box that can have its own home on the counter or in a cupboard.

 The other “small” project is my sewing stuff. I have a lot of fabric and other notions for sewing and right now they are scattered though out the house and long term storage. My goal end for this stuff is to have it all in one place and only have out what I need for whatever sewing projecting I am working on. Since we have a smallish townhouse and our want to reduce any type of clutter I will be storing everything in air tight Rubbermaid containers in the garage attic. This will entail me to have to sort through everything and get it better organized and the containers labeled.

There has been some progress made on the garage. We (the lovely husband and I) are waiting for a nice cool day to get to work on it. Pulling out what is garbage, what can go into a yard sale and what we are planning to keep. We also agreed that whatever doesn’t sell at a yard sale will go to Goodwill.

So the purging and organizing has seen some pauses and progress. This is not all that bad, sometimes it is good to have pauses in the grand scheme of things; it helps with progress on the details. It also helps to have pauses on the details, it helps us pull back and look at the bigger picture, our ultimate goal. Through this process there is going to be many pauses and much progress, we will arrive at our ultimate goal when we get there, which will be the best time for us.

The Purge has begun.........

As I stated we are clearing out lives of all the unwanted, unneeded clutter. Well it has begun, it started one day when I could cram anymore into the junk drawer. This prompted me to clean it out and honestly I got rid of 90% of the stuff in there. Yesterday I tackled my bookshelf. This bookshelf sits next to our computer desk and holds my many cross stitching books, my school books and other random things that find their way from the desk to the shelf. Once again a majority of the stuff on there was a)either in the wrong place (the "set it there just for now" disorder) or b) garbage. Once I got rid of the garbage and put the things that were out of place where they belonged I was able to re-organize the shelves. Now all of my cross stitch books are on the bottom, the middle shelf is for papers that have to be filed, the 1st shelf is for my old school books and the way top right now is holding the dance tops I am working on but when school starts up it will also hold my current school books.  Now that the little areas are done it's time to move to the bigger areas. Our many closets (one of which is getting turned into a pantry), the garage and the garage attic area. I hope that we can eliminate at least 90% from all of those areas also. This should help us use our storage area more efficiently.

Modernly Simple?

What is modernly simple? To me modernly simple means getting back to a simpler way of life but doing it with a modern twist. I am not talking about "going green", though some of the things I am doing will have a green spin to them. The first thing that I am going to do is clear our lives of all of the unwanted and un-needed junk and clutter. This should help lower the stress in our life. I will update on the progress.