A clock and box

      I finally put the innards into this grandfather clock that sits in our house. The weights and the pendulum were still in a box out in the garage from when we moved to Florida 9 years ago. The clock's window has been displaying the lovely packing paper placed there by the movers all this time. I couldn't even be bothered to remove that until now.
     Actually, now that I think of it "I" didn't technically put the innards in the clock. I brought the box into the house with the intent of putting in the weights. However, when my husband discovered what I was trying to do he was pretty quick to take over, afraid I'd ruin the clock. But, no matter, the point is that there is one less box out in my garage. Yippee!
   

Trash Day Friday

      Hurray, it's trash day here in my neighborhood. Is there any happier day when you are trying to get rid of stuff in your house?
      One of the items I was able to relieve myself of today was a baby chair. It's one of those chairs where you strap in the baby then push the button to make it vibrate.

Here sits Baby #2, Garrett, in the baby chair. 

      However, by the time I had my third baby the chair had lost the battery compartment cover and the metal framing was bent so I was not sure how long the chair would be able to support baby #3. Seeing as this item is useless to anyone else, it's a mystery why I've been storing it in the closet.
      I do feel a little sad to think of the chair on its way to live at the dump though; that chair held many happy memories.

Telephone Books

     Not so long ago at a gathering, a friend laughed about the uselessness of telephone books.
"Really, who still uses a telephone book to look up a number?!" she exclaimed.
"Um, I do." I replied sheepishly.

     We probably went on to discuss why I just didn't look up the info on the internet or a smartphone, but I don't clearly remember. What I do know is that I still use my phone books quite a bit. Maybe I'm just being stubborn or perhaps I like the nostalgia of the familiar yellow book from my childhood.
      However, the point is I don't need seven different phone books dating back to 2009. One will suffice. So today I cleared out a drawer and sent them to the recycling bin. It was a small task to do, but felt like good progress towards ridding myself of this mess.

In the beginning...

      January 1, 2013 was the day I resolved, probably with millions of other people, that this was the year I would get organized. I was struggling through the everyday monotony of life, and felt it just should not be this stressful. Lost keys, lost unpaid bills, lost shoes, lost hours of my life that I would never get back. Life would be so much more carefree, like a tropical vacation, if I could just find my stuff.
     On a mission to put the house in order, I took to the internet looking for inspiration, and I found it in this cute little blog called Iheartorganizing.com. The blog's author has a nicely decorated, down-to-earth house with three kids, but not the kid clutter explosion that you'd find at my house. I liked the website, because she let you look inside her drawers, closets and laundry room, explaining why she put what where, which is exactly the tutorial I needed. Not only were her things organized, she went the extra step of making her organizing pretty with decorative papers lining the drawers and attractive little containers to contain her stuff.
     Ahh, I thought. If I could just make my house look like hers, then I could be happy. I started in the kitchen organizing the drawers so I could finally find my utensils when I needed them. I made drawer dividers out of cardboard to separate the kitchen towels from the wash rags and the baby bibs. I modge-podged pretty paper onto clothes pins then glued those to the inside of the cupboard doors, so I could hang stuff up. And I started buying little decorative containers from Target so I could store and pretty-up my stuff.

The only remaining clothespin. The others fell off.

Decorative Owl Cups to store stuff in

   








   
      About that time, I had read through the entire blog like you would a novel and was looking for my next organizing blog fix. I suspect my time would have been better spent dealing with my clutter, but reading on the internet about cleaning was much more enjoyable than actually cleaning. That's when I ran into a couple minimalist blog sites. What a fascinating lifestyle to read about, like watching a good episode of Hoarders, fascinating. And like a good episode of Hoarders, I walked away thinking that I owned entirely too much stuff.

Decorative boxes that I never found
a use for.

More unused decorative boxes.
But aren't they pretty sitting in my closet.

   











      The big minimalist message to resonate with me was this: the less items in my life to be tended, mended and put away, the more time to devote to what is actually important to me. After months of mulling over this principle I realized. I don't need to organize my stuff. I need to get rid of it.
     So here it is 2014. I'm no longer organizing; I'm "minimalizing". And I'm certainly not buying any more decorative containers.