Well, let me rephrase that. I would LIKE it if we had a clean, tidy, and uncluttered house.
Realistically, our family of 11 has a LOT of stuff. We have clutter. We have extra stuff. We are blessed to have a big house and a lot of storage room but still, we're a long way from the ideals of Marie Kondo's The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. (That's a weird book incidentally, as it is written by a Japanese lady and her way at looking at the world is quite different from mine.)
Anyway. I'm sure that the logical way to declutter and organize would be to set aside an hour every week and toil away at something. BUT, that's not me. Instead, 2 or 3 times a year the urge to organize slugs me over the head, and I go crazy for a couple of weeks. And you guessed it, now is the time.
This, dear readers, is my proudest image. THIS is our storage room/secret room/tornado shelter. Mostly a storage room. We call it the secret room sometimes because it is sort of, vaguely, hidden in one corner of the basement. And it is a splendid tornado shelter. Anyhoo, there is lots of stuff in this room but it is way better than usual. You can see the FLOOR. Lots of floor. I rearranged stuff and threw away other stuff and tidied up the floor considerably. AND, we have friends with a new baby and we are going to give them the exersaucer and backpack, so soon that will be out of here.
I took all the book off a bookcase in our main hall, and moved the bookcase downstairs into the basement so it would be less "in the way." I took that opportunity to go through all the books on that bookcase and evaluate them.
Now let me just be honest here. I come from a family of book fiends. My parents have...I don't know. Thousands and thousands and thousands of books. They are on bookshelves and very well organized, but it is a truly extraordinary bunch of books. So honestly, having a bunch of books seems normal, logical, even godly, to me :-). But I am forcing myself to be choosy and I am getting rid of some books. I still have many, many books (many hundred, I would guess) but if a book is just not that awesome, I'm getting rid of it. Gone are the days when I would snaffle up almost any book I could lay my hands on.
So yeah, I'm getting rid of some items (we donated 4 bags of clothes to Goodwill this week, and have 4 more bags to go the local crisis pregnancy center) and I'm also planning to organize our games and puzzles over the next few weeks. Since school is winding down for the year, this is a reasonable time to accomplish this task.
This all takes time, effort, and work so one question is, why bother? I'm guessing most people know the answer but I'll say it anyway -- an organized, uncluttered house is so much easier to manage. When we keep what we really need and want, and get rid of less desirable items, we open up storage space, allow easy access to items, and can remember where items are. That is one goal, incidentally, of getting rid of books -- I'd rather keep ones I really care about, and keep them in organized places, than have a whole bunch of books stored so randomly that I can't lay my hands on them easily.
Regarding clothes, we are getting rid of Rose's clothing as she grows out of them, and we're also getting rid of Daniel's very "male" clothing that HE grows out of. This is diminishing our store of clothing quite considerably, which is delightful.
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