Do you feel like your living space is somehow hampering your best efforts to organise your life and move forward? Instead of being a relaxing retreat, does your home make you feel stressed? This is exactly how I felt once I became a Mum and gave up my job 15 years ago.
Downstairs, superficially, the living and dining areas in my house looked reasonably ok – you could walk through without tripping over piles of stuff (although there were a lot of toys!), the dining table was always clear. But, underneath the surface, chaos reigned – full to bursting cupboards and drawers, a kitchen (usually out of bounds to visitors) with crowded work surfaces and papers everywhere; and upstairs was just awful. I won’t dwell on the garage which was so full of stuff that you could not walk from one end to the other.
My spare room was unusable as a bedroom as it was full of stuff – books, photographs, laundry both dry and drying, cds, more papers and anything else that had nowhere else to go. Our bedroom had piles of papers (that word again) in several places and was not a relaxing space at all.
Our home office was similarly overflowing and chaotic. If my husband had invited over any business visitors, we would spend the previous day stashing all the papers and books and anything else on the floor and surfaces into plastic bags and hastily tidying all the shelves and worktop. The bags would then stay in the spare room for a few months before returning to the study, completely untouched.
In addition, the house desperately needed some serious updating and modernisation. But the idea of having builders in was just too overwhelming – where would we put all our stuff!
Was it any wonder that I felt constantly on the edge of chaos?
I knew I had to sort myself out. Once my younger child went to school, I wanted to go back to work but could not see how I would cope with the house the way it was. I would watch television programmes such as ‘The Life Laundry’ and ‘How clean is your house’ as well as buy books (more clutter!) and trawl the web to find out more about organising and decluttering. Gradually I started to think things through and sort myself out but it took several years and trying out different ideas (from Feng Shui to Flylady!) before I really got to grips with the whole decluttering and organising thing. It’s been a fascinating journey and I am still learning.
My sister felt the same as me about her house and together we have been learning how to declutter and organise our homes. We have now decided to start a decluttering and organising blog to encourage us to keep going on our journey and to maybe help anyone else out there who feels like we did a few years ago – desperate and hoping for a lifeline.
Welcome to our blog!
