Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Make Room Challenge - Week 3: Clutter and Entry PART 1

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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