33.333 percent decrapified

You guys! I’m a third of the way there! The house is getting lighter by the day. Feels amazing!

It’s just taking waaaaay longer than I thought it would. I want to rush through it, but the thing is I actually quite enjoy the process. It is soothing and rewarding to me to sit down on the floor with a pile-o-crap and sort through it. Instant gratification if you will.

The upstairs is done. Except for our master closet. That is a space we shall not speak of. (*whispers* EVER.)

But the rest is done! We have empty dresser drawers:

I’m weird – we have a lot of dressers in our house but I don’t use most of them for clothes. I use them for storage. And empty drawers in my storage is AWESOME.

I went through every little itty bitty crafty item:

See? Empty spots. Beautifulness.

Many of you asked what I did with the IKEA table that used to sit behind our sofa. Well, with a little sweat and nudging and cursing, I got it into my son’s closet:

I wasn’t ready to get rid of it just yet and the floor of his closet was empty, so now I use it to hold his off-season/too big clothing. Someday I’ll build something more permanent in there, but for now this has worked great!

In our bathroom I tackled under our sinks:

Mine wasn’t too bad. Thing was I haven’t used any of this stuff (other than the dryer) in years.

Soooo…I installed a little hook for the hair dryer and there. you. go.:

So here’s my process – I look at something and follow my gut reaction. As soon as I see it I know if I should keep it or not. Like the hair curlers that I had under the sink – first reaction was get rid of them. I haven’t used them in forever. Then I sit with them for a minute and have time to think about it more and start to second guess.

Then I remember…I haven’t used them for YEARS. Outta here!

I can count on two hands the things I regret getting rid of over the past ten years or so. And that’s not I regret it because they meant something to me and I’m sad, it’s because it was something I later could have used that I had to buy. Nothing big though…the only thing I can even remember is a small drapery rod I donated that I realized later I could have used.

So, I say go with your first instinct when it comes to the clutter. Your gut is rarely wrong. :)

Our linen closet took me the longest – it actually didn’t look horrible to begin with, but last time I did this I never labeled the bins in there. So over the years we just started tossing stuff in bins and didn’t pay attention to where they went. That meant we couldn’t find stuff and bought stuff and had too much stuff when we already had stuff.

Got it?

Decluttering saves you money, seriously. I’ve got a lot of money to save in the garage someday. ;)

Here’s how it looks with the bins labeled:

It makes me twitch just a tad that that one bin on the bottom doesn’t match the others. Just a bit. I’ll get through.

This is the spot for all of the toiletries in our house – the bins are lotions/soap, extras, shaving stuff, first aid, nail stuff and then a bin for random things like my contacts, etc.

I think we’re set on toilet paper. And we like Kleenex.

It’s beautiful.

A few weeks ago I hung two more of these battery lights:

One regret I have after building our house is that I didn’t have lights put in the closets. I kick myself for that. I have one of these lights in our powder room closet and I love it – it’s the brightest battery light I’ve found. I think they are $10 and you can find them on end caps most places. I got these at Target I think? (I picked them up a few months ago.)

After I was done with the bathroom my husband told me thank you no less than four times over the course of a couple days. He is totally fine with clutter and messes, more than me – but when I finished this up he was so thrilled at how easy it was to find his stuff. It mad me happy that he was happy.

When I declutter I have a “home base” for all the stuff I’m getting rid of – it all goes in our foyer so I can easily load the car. Here’s the first pile after the guest room:

Told you there were many pillows.

And after my son’s room, the loft and some of our room:

I had four more bags after that of trash/recycling/donation from the rest of our room and bathroom. (To see what I do with the things I’m not keeping, check out this post.)

The rest of the house will not result in such big piles. (I say that now.) But really, other than the kitchen it’s more organizing than decluttering. I’m 33 percent there. Powering on!

Are you inspired to declutter before the holidays? :)