This is one of the corners we tidied last week, heading out to our garage on the left. The doors on the right are the new "mud room closet" for school backpack and other items that seem to get tossed on the family room floor or sofa right inside the entry door from school. Now to instill the discipline for the items to get put away every day. That may be tougher than the actual clean up!
I am trying to hold back from going too "minimalist" on the family but in the last week have put on the minimalist movie on Netflix and put up this quote temporarily (maybe -HA!). The Man doesn't like motivational quotes on walls, He calls them "-ISMs". Clearly he has no idea what's going on in the world of home decor and signage right now because I seriously only have this hanging in the entire house right now. He has no idea how sign crazy his life could be with other women. Ha. He needs to spend some time on Instagram so he can appreciate my restraint. Haha.
But I do feel some responsibility to help our family see that less is more, everything needs to have a place and that we don't need a lot to be happy. I have to regularly remind myself of that too and I am pretty minimalist already. This all plays into having gratitude, living frugally, making good financial decisions, managing our emotions, our recognition of wants vs. needs and so much more. It really is important to our overall well-being.
I'm going to keep trying to schedule in at least one of two projects each week to keep this momentum going. Even if we do 30 minutes on a weeknight once a week and an hour on Saturdays we will still make a lot of progress. I'm convinced that the more we work,the more efficiently we'll work as we go forward so we can get more done, more quickly. I think that will come along in part because along the way we're making final decisions about where things will be stored and what is of value and necessary to keep. As we continue to make these decisions it gets easier and faster to make them. I also think it really helps that we've lived in the house for a little over a year now so we understand out patterns, habits and what entryways we use most often, where we like to keep things handy, etc.
I've never really done this in a house before now but I really think it is wise to continually re-evaluate how you are using your space and what works best for your family. Things change over time, we learn that some things don't work as well as we thought they might and our families living in our homes change too. What worked well for babies might now work well for the grade school era, what works for grade school might benefit from changes made for middle school years and so on.
I think we're all seeing enough progress to see some light at the end of the tunnel. We'll get settled into this house yet! Yay! I hope along the way we're gaining some new skills in working together as a family, learning to live with less, the best ways to organize a home for our needs, appreciating what we have, what we don't need to be happy and other lessons we may not even recognize yet that will be valuable to all of us going forward and will also make our home even better in a variety of ways. This is exciting to think about. It makes me want to jump up and start a little project right now.
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