A new year!

My goal for 2011 was to get back to the basics in my life.  I am still working on that goal, so now it is my goal for 2012.  It is a new year though, and I am much closer to being where I want to be.  I began by cleaning out and organizing my home.  We had too much stuff!  I have had many conversations with friends about how I did this and what I did so I am going to write about it.  It may take me several posts, so bear with me.

I went room by room and made a list on a legal pad of paper.  I do much better when things are written down and this also helped me to let it go.  As long as it was down on paper, I did not have to think about it.  After I had my list for every room, I asked my husband what was the room that bothered him the most.  That is where I started with my de-cluttering and organizing.  Our house has an open floor plan, so our first floor is a great room.  One room leads into the other, and this is the room he picked. It was overwhelming to me, so I took that room and broke it down into parts.  There are many things that are going on in this area: kitchen, school, my desk and our entertainment (television, couch's).  I found quickly that in order for me to organize this area I had to get rid of some things, but mostly I had to relocate them to other areas of the house.  This became a problem because I had no where to go with them.  I wrote down all my ideas for this area and then had to shift my efforts to the basement.  We had so much stuff in our basement that we had path's to walk through it all.  Yes, we had quite a collection of boxes and stuff!  I took it one box at a time, with a goal of at least one box per day.  There were days that the box was easy to go through so I did more than one box.  Soon, it became really easy for me.  I got into a rhythm and was ready to get rid of most of our stuff.  I even got my husband excited so he came down and helped me.  There were some Saturdays that we were down there as a family going through boxes and putting them into the piles (give away, trash, keep).  After a month of working down there almost every day except Sundays, I had cut our boxes down by more than half.  I was so excited and it was fun crossing things off of my list for the basement.

We then organized our basement to make it more functional.  We now had enough room to bring some of the kids toys downstairs that would work and give them more room to play.  I also set up 2 shelves so I can have a pantry which helped me to organize my kitchen better and set up an area for my school supplies and books so I have an area in the basement to keep the stuff I don't use on a daily basis for school.  I will try to get some pictures tonight and give you more details on how I have organized these two areas of my basement.  I will say this, I was in the basement the other night and decided that I am ready to get rid of more stuff.  I still think we have way too much stuff that we are not using.  This time, I will take before and after pictures.  Please let me know if you have any comments as I want to be a help in any way I can.  You may have things to add that may help me too!