In the last few weeks I have done a whole lot of reading this book: Make Room For What You Love By Melissa Michaels of The Inspired Room Blog and thinking and pondering about what I need and don't need to make my home happy and calm and functional. As you know by now, I am taking part in the Make Room Challenge to organize and declutter and in turn make room for what I truly love.
This week's task was:
Clutter and Entry
Make Room for Arrivals and Departures
The entryway and mudroom of my house is the biggest clutter magnet of all! Awhile back I streamlined our "Command Center" - which is such a funny term to me, because sometimes it does seem like I am trying to direct rockets into space with all that I have to manage around my house! Anyway, that space has been working pretty well for us and it didn't need much work except a quick sort and purge. You can see what is looked like before here.
Here is what it looked like on Monday:
Okay, not terrible, but after only a few minutes of sorting, it looked like this:
It's amazing what can be done in a few minutes if you have a good system. We have a magazine file from Ikea that has a slot for each family member's important papers. This has been great! A friend of mine asked me once "Where do you keep all your mail and school papers?" and I pointed to that magazine file. If the paper needs to be kept, or if I need to deal with it later in goes in that file, otherwise it gets immediately recycled or filed where it belongs. Bills go into a binder pocket with our family budget, so they never get misplaced.
We also keep a clipboard with our weekly meal planner/grocery list. I have seen (and even made) some really cute weekly meal planners, but I always revert back to this old one from my friend Sarah. What I like about it is I can write my meals for the week and my grocery list and then on Sunday I can just tear off the grocery list part and take it to the store with me! Sometimes simplest is easiest.
I have also evolved away from buying fancy calendars because found that I would put everything in my phone calendar and then have to transfer it to the paper calendar which was a hassle. Once I had everything connected on the "cloud" I could sinc my phone calendar, computer calendar and my husband's work calendar. At that point it made more sense to me to just print out or calendar one month at a time. I found this cute burlap pin board at Homegoods and I just tack our calendar for the month to it.
I just can't say enough about how good it feels to declutter and make space for space. For me, clearing off cluttered flat surfaces and moving out things that I don't need and eliminating visual clutter is like walking in the woods on a hike and stopping to take a deep breath of air and noticing the world that surrounds you.
I am realizing that clearing clutter is a spiritual experience for me. Maybe that is why I have been trying to do it for so long?!
I would love to hear how you feel about decluttering? Leave a comment below or link to your decluttering projects.
I will be back to share Part 2 of this week's challenge tomorrow - My Mudroom!
In the meantime you too can join in the Make Room Challenge or order the book...here.
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