We are going through the big D and I don’t mean Dallas. While we would never consider divorcing each other (who would have us after 35 years of bad habits?) We are decluttering. I look at Pinterst and it appears online that decluttering, organizing, and purging are super easy. It makes everyone feel better, can be accomplished in a weekend and then your life is golden.
Here in my Reality Land, that has not been our experience. We are sill figuring out the whole less is more thing. Two years ago we had 4350 square feet of living space divided between two homes with two sets of most things. We had two kitchens, six bedrooms, four bathrooms, and a two garages. We had a ton of stuff we were used to having around us.
Now we have one galley style kitchen, three bedrooms (one is really a craft room), two bathrooms, no totally weather proof garage, and a total of just under 1700 square feet here at Providence Acres. I hope you understand I am not complaining. We know we are blessed to have a nice home and we chose to move to the country and downsize. We longed for it. We dreamed of it. We sacrificed to be able to make this move.
When we moved into Providence Acres we realized that in our almost 34 years of marriage we accumulated a lot of duplicates.
We actually had nine, yes 9, measuring cups. Here are 7 of them on display. Considering I am not much of a cook, that is an impressive number.
For our two heads we had 10 hair brushes.
In my vanity there were nine sets of nail clippers.
I was too overwhelmed to count the reading glasses and sun glasses, but it is a large amount.
Looking at all that stuff, it might seem like thinning the heard on stuff like this would be easy but in fact it took time to decide what we kept and what we got rid of.
We now are the proud owners of about 10% of the stuff you see in the pictures above.
The work didn’t stop in the kitchen and laundry room.
Our closet was ( is and probably always will be) the biggest storage issue in our home. We had an expansive 14 foot long double rack closet with six additional single rack storage at each end, and a whole wall of built in shelving at my end in our suburban home master bedroom. It was glorious.
I had room for things that I didn’t even like, but thought they might be good to keep. Oh how I miss you, 14 foot closet of wonderfulness.
My 1980’s bi-fold door closet has six feet of storage but honestly only about 5 feet is usable space. Five disfunctional feet that you can’t get to without knocking stuff off.
We haven’t gotten rid of enough clothes, shoes, scarves, and coats yet, but the back of my car was filled several times for trips to Goodwill.
Annnd I took over the guest room closet with dress clothes. Oh, and the winter coats are in the craft room closet.
When I retire I pinky promise to get rid of more, but now I need basically two wardrobes. Work and weekend.
My goal for the summer is to make hard decisions about the furniture in storage. I am going to either fix it, paint it, reimagine it, or let it go. There is a huge online sale in my future.
The downsizing will continue but we have made a dent in our stuff.
Next week I will let you peek into our hoard of furniture, but not yet. It is scary.
Thanks for following along.
Blessings,
Karen
