The day started with me having to get up early for another plasterer to come round to look around and quote us for the ceilings that we need doing. He’ll come back to us with a price in a couple of days.
I then couldn’t decide what was the best use of my time. It seems that no matter how much I am clearing, I’m still seeing so much clutter around.
The answer has got to be to have less stuff and the only way to do that is to get rid of it even though I might want it one day. That’s the bit I’m finding hard. I need to own less stuff and that will mean that I will have less to manage.
This is what was on my mind this morning:
- A bedroom full of clutter that I need to sort out that seems to have grown arms and legs in the last week or so. It’s getting to the point where I can just about get into my side of the bed.
- The thought of having to empty our built in wardrobes before they are knocked out this coming Thursday.
- The spare room that I really need to continue working on as my daughter is starting to think that the room will never be hers (it seemed a much easier task few months ago when we said she would be able to move in there by her 16th birthday… which is in a few weeks).
- The garage that I need to continue creating space in by bagging things up. Deep down I wanted to do that the most today as I can hide in there 😀.
- Dinner to cook before the bedroom furniture designer was going to arrive at 1.30pm
- Allocating an hour or two for the bedroom furniture designer’s visit with no ideas on how I wanted our room.
- Two lots of washing including uniforms etc
- Cleaning the bathrooms as I didn’t get a chance mid-week
I know full well that starting the day with only a plan in my head is never a good idea. It wasn’t until I wrote it all down above that I could see that I was never going to get it all done.
As you can imagine, I got a bit overwhelmed this morning because of the amount of jobs I wanted to do. It took my youngest teen to put me back on track. She sat me down and made suggestions. Together we made some progress.
She reminded me that I wanted to take the small bookcase out of the spare room and put it in the hallway downstairs. So, she helped me take all of the DVDs out and put them on a couple of shelves in the cupboards. This is only temporary as the final destination will be the room that my eldest will eventually move out of.
Seeing the empty cabinet made me feel so much better and between us we managed to carry it down the stairs and put in the hallway.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you may remember a month or so ago that I moved a glass cabinet from the hallway into the garage leaving us with clear space but no shelf . This cabinet matches the floor better and the shelves can be used until we find something we want that’s slightly smaller. I don’t want to buy anything until we’re sure so this will do for now.
I then spent some time cooking roast pork chops whilst moving the large plastic boxes out of the main part of the spare room. They haven’t quite made it into the garage as they were heavy so I’ve put the boxes of photos back in the empty spare room wardrobe for now. It’ll be easy to lift them into the room that my eldest daughter will eventually move out of. What I like is that items are now in categories in the spare room and out of sight leaving us with more room in there to get the room ready.
Bedroom designer visit
We discussed designs for our room with the bedroom furniture designer and he left us with a quote and few ideas. Although my husband wanted me to think about how I wanted the room, I really couldn’t think about it with everything else going on in my mind. I think the man knew that we weren’t in a position to make a decision today (he was getting impatient with us because we either kept changing our minds, or not agreeing with each other). He left us with the paperwork and his phone number. He wasn’t pushy which was good.
The evening
We did our usual Skype with my mum and dad which was lovely, and then my eldest and I watched a new film that’s just come out on DVD. It’s called Dare to Dream which is about the law of attraction and based on The Secret book by Rhonda Byrne. It was a nice easy going feel good film, and my daughter and I had a lovely cuddle whilst watching it.
Bath time now… can’t wait
Until tomorrow…
Sandra
Sandra Madeira 
I think you might be trying to do too much all at once. I have been following you on this journey and from what I gather, you hardly ever get rid of stuff. This is the hardest part, but for me it was the start. Once I learned that I didn’t need or use most of the stuff I had it was like a fog lifting. I even did it in stages, I did one quick sweep of the kitchen getting rid of mostly duplicates and then another 6 months later realizing that some of the items I kept in case, were not needed at all or something else would serve just as well.
I honestly get exhausted for you reading about how you move things from room to room, give yourself a break and concentrate on your bedroom and your spare room and when they are done, move on. You have done so much, but now you are just shifting things.
I totally agree that I’m doing too much all at once. That’s me being a people pleaser and trying to meet everyone’s needs. I’ll always be grateful for your comments every day highlighting where you think I should be focusing my attention. Reading your comment earlier today gave me the push that I needed to throw away an extra few items out of the garage and also things lying around in the garden. Thank you for playing things back to me so that I can see the error in my ways 😊
I am not criticizing you at all, just letting you know I have been there.
I know you’re not 😊. It’s comforting to know that you’ve been there, thank you