I am not going back to daily blogging.
But I am blogging, more, for a while, on a single topic - decluttering.
If you tune in just on Fridays, there are additional posts you have missed.
As I sit here, writing, in the winter of 2024, I have sold/rehomed/donated hundreds of things from our house.
And please note, our house absolutely does not look empty. If by magic everything I have sold reappeared on the driveway, we would be absolutely amazed/horrified at the volume. We would look at that pile and say - where was it all? We could Tetris it back in the house, but we could absolutely not reabsorb it in a nice way.
We have been in this house for over 22 years. We were in the last house for about 15 years. Our kids range from 26-34. Youngest only remembers this house.
I had a large garage sale before we left the old house (2002). I had the movers set up beds here in the new house, but put everything else in the garage. After we moved the keepers in the house and put them away, I had a second garage sale, with everything still in the garage (2002).
As each kid graduated from high school, we sorted through their childhood bedrooms. When they graduated from college, we did the same. Those clean outs were between 2008 and 2022. (Yes, we had kids in college, continuously and overlapping from 2008-2022. Everyone now has their under grad degree and their masters.)
Besides the kids’ bedroom clean outs, we have been through the whole house and garage many times.
I had a year where I systematically took care of ten things a day, every day, to massively clean out and organized our out of control garage.
My husband and I have reduced/organized/cleaned our attic 4-6 times since 2018. My goal is an empty attic. With each clean out, we are closer.
So my reduction/decluttering has a long, consistent history.
I am a good organizer. I am a very good declutter-er.
But for years, even with all this decluttering, we had a very messy house, because we had too much stuff. And because we did not have proper daily and weekly cleaning habits.
That garage sale, 2018, started the process, in earnest, for me. I mark that as the turning point.
But it was not until the fall of 2023 that real progress was made and I finally understood.
