Ah, empty space.....

None of you have ever seen my house, but if you remember a bit back on the BB, we were talking about clutter and Anita said if the clutter overtakes the function of the room, you have too much stuff? Well, this describes my whole house pretty much. We've been there over 5 years, but it really looks like we just moved in. There's boxes in the living room and dining room and in the corner of the back bedroom. There's just stuff everywhere, with paths to get from room to room.

Saturday morning my mom asked me how much I would want her to pay me to help her clean the house. I've been through this little game with her before and her idea of cleaning is usually move the stuff in the area she wants clean (in this case the back of the living room for the Christmas tree) to another area of the house (ie the back bedroom). I'm not going to play that game with her this time, so I told her if she was really going to clean it up, get rid of stuff, throw stuff out, and finish the job, I would help her for free. She agreed so Saturday afternoon we started on the living room.

I was getting quite frustrated because I wanted to see progress faster than it's happening. I wanted to be able to get boxes out of there and see more space. It feels like we're just moving stuff around really, and I'm tired of having to move stuff and reach over stuff and step around stuff to get around. I was hoping to start getting stuff out of boxes and either in homes in the house or in boxes to go to charity. The charity box is coming along ok, but the problem is that there's nowhere to store anything in the living room or dining room. There's the entertainment center and 4 bookshelves and that's it. The desk is like 3 pieces of wood put together, no storage, and there's no drawer space or cabinet space anywhere. So I think my mom is going to have to do some shopping on Black Friday.

So Sunday night I tackled a big stack of stuff outside the kitchen. It started out as the earthquake supply box, but then became Christmas stuff and clothes and whatever happened to get tossed on the pile. I sorted it out, and got it down to just the container of earthquake stuff and the container of Christmas stuff, and my mom moved them away from that wall to turn on the heat, so now we have a little area of empty space!! :D :D I never thought empty space could make me so happy, lol. I did a couple little happy dances in the space last night.

So tonight I think we're going to take the big pile of clothes in the kitchen to the laundromat and sort them between keep and charity. That will leave more empty space :D

I'm looking forward to getting all those boxes out.....