New Year and nesting instincts…uh oh!

It seems that at the beginning of a new year I feel the need to de-clutter our house and try to make things more organized. I never have actually followed through with these feelings and acted on them though. But this year, I’m having those usual “new year = no clutter” feelings ON TOP of nesting instincts. Look out! I know I’m probably going to regret it. But I just really feel the need to purge the house of unnecessary items and clutter. The question is, just which items are “unnecessary” or not?! I am so very sentimental about things. I mean I am excessively sentimental about things. I tend to anthropomorphize items. I can’t help it! I know they don’t really have feelings, but that’s just a quirk of mine I can’t shake.

I wanted to start with one of our spare bedrooms we call the craft room. It’s really become a catch-all for items we didn’t know where else to put in the last year or so. It became very cluttered. See photo below!

Yeah…it is a mess! You can’t walk in the room. It’s all a haphazard mess of towering magazine stacks, clothes that need repairing, old books, craft items, my sewing machine cover (big white box in the foreground), etc…So that was the first room I tackled. I still have the darn 24/7 nausea even though I’m in the 2nd trimester of my pregnancy. I really should be over it by now, but it seems to be lingering for me. 🙁 But anyway, I decided I really needed to get some of these things done, and if I waited till I wasn’t sick feeling anymore, Lillian might already be born by then and I won’t have time to clean and organize rooms!

I got to work and sorted magazines: tossed a lot, and neatly stacked the rest by genre (birding, gardening, cooking, home, photography, etc) and put into magazine bins in our office. So no more loose piles of magazines on the floor. Yay! Next, I gathered all the loose books laying around and put them in their respective shelves throughout the house, or put into a give-away pile if I had read it and didn’t really care to read it again. I’m trying to be better about hanging onto things if I don’t absolutely need to!

Then it was on to my huge stack of loose scrapbooking items and photos. You can’t see it in the pic above. It’s all behind that big gray bin. Got those all neatly piled and organized. Anyway, it goes on and on. Finally I had the room in some semblance of order, and you can actually walk into the room now. Yay! There were about four garbage bags full of trash that came out of it. And by trash, I mean I actually really had trash in there even. Why? I guess I must not have thought it was trash at the time. Like the stuff you get in the mail “join our painting of the month club” blah blah and they send you a free sample. I had stuff like that laying on the floor in there! I didn’t mind tossing that!

So here’s what the room is looking like now:

Obviously there are still a lot of things in the room that need to be moved into more permanent homes elsewhere. (Like the big bins need to go in the garage…when we make room in there…sigh.) At least you can see the floor now!