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.