Declutter- Revisited

At the beginning of the year, I said that my word for this year was declutter. After visiting Ali Edward's blog, I was encouraged to look back at my word and see how I have been doing with it.

 

As I look around our home, I am very comfortable with how the word declutter has worked for us. I only have clothes in my closet and drawers that fit and that I actually wear. I am not having to squish clothes into their place because there is room. In the office, I no longer have to dread walking into it and seeing where everything has just piled up as I have decluttered other spaces in our home. Our living room is open and clean feeling (until Addie brings out her toys and makes herself comfortable). The kitchen has a clean, open feel to it because that gets decluttered on an almost weekly basis. My scrapbook space has been cleaned out, leaving me with less "stuff" and surprisingly more to actually work with.

Are there still areas that I can work on? Absolutely! One area that I am working on this week is the laundry room. Now I know that there is never such a thing as an empty hamper (happened to me one time...didn't last long, though), but we can keep the laundry room looking nice. I organized the shelf that goes over the washer and dryer (glass jars together, laundry items, etc.) and wiped down my two maidens (washer and dryer...see past Proverbs 31 posts). Right now, I have two black garbage bags in there filled with clothes (between my sister and me) that I need to sort, wash, iron, hang, and get ready to take to a local consignment shop. I did go through half of one bag today. At the rate I am going I will have those clothes sorted and done by Thursday, Lord willing.

 

I will continue working on my word for the rest of this year (actually, it is good word to keep in mind always) as I find other places that need to be decluttered- junk drawer, (we all have one-admit it, you do, too), cabinets (my least favorites to work on are the candle/medicine cabinet in the kitchen, the bathroom cabinets, and the cleaning product cabinet under the kitchen sink), and garage (who purposely likes to hang out in a stuffy, hot place to clean?). However, as the woman of this home, it is my job to do these things. Are these jobs that will gain us any kind of recognition? Probably not...unless we leave all of the cabinet doors, closet doors, and drawers open. Yet, what a great sense of relief we get when we have accomplished our goal to making our homes the haven that they are meant to be. One of my daily prayer requests is "...and please, Lord, give me the desire to do the things in this home that I don't feel like doing." God has always answered that prayer with an energy that I cannot explain, a desire that I didn't know I had, and a wonderful result when the job is done.