My daughter helped me tidy the kitchen last night and then disappeared upstairs saying she had an idea. Half an hour later she came down with this message in a frame which she had created herself on her computer.
My husband and I instantly loved it, as we all do like to be silly and dance around the kitchen. She found the frame in the spare room collecting dust from a shopping spree that we had a couple of years ago. We bought different sizes and never used them.
Clutter castles
This got me looking at the remaining clutter lying around including this clutter castle in the corner and the mess on the dining room table.
Clutter castle
After we decluttered, my daughter had an idea how to make the table look nicer and suggested putting some decoration in the centre. She then laid the table to show me how different our dining room could look. She put a plant that was on the breakfast bar in a different pot and we picked up a few candles whilst we were at the supermarket this evening. We were really happy with the final result.
She’s got some great ideas and seems to really want to help just like she did with the kitchen cupboards and drawers the other week.
Just wanted to update you on how I felt after my very long walk yesterday. Although I had rushed out the house a bit stressed, I returned one hour and twenty minutes later in a happier state of mind. It’s amazing what fresh air, exercise, and time to think can do. It reframes your mind and allows you to see things much clearer.
When I got back, the house was quiet and my girls were keeping themselves occupied in their rooms. They then decided to made a delicious lemon drizzle cake whilst I pottered around in the garden. I later found out that my husband didn’t even know that I’d gone out for a walk as he had fallen asleep on the settee!
I suggested a takeaway for dinner and went to collect 3 x burger and fries and 1 x pizza from our favourite Farmhouse restaurant (practising social distancing of course). It was delicious and I was very grateful that I didn’t have to cook. We finished the evening watching the ‘very different’ Eurovision Song Contest – 30 seconds of each song without the voting.
Today was better
I felt much more calm and in control today. I tried to go with the flow of how I was feeling and after a late breakfast asked my daughters if they wanted to watch a girlie movie together. We chose Cinderella – the 2015 version with Lily James. It’s a beautiful feel-good type of film, and ‘have courage’ and ‘be kind’ echoed in my mind long after the film.
It’s time for the baby plants to go outside
It was lovely weather today and I was determined to repot some of the plants that I’d started growing from seedlings at the beginning of lockdown. They’ve been in the conservatory and every day we’ve been putting them on the patio for watering and to get them used to being outside. This is how much the geraniums and whirlybird mix have grown from the three packets of seeds I sowed back in March…
I found some tubs down the side of the house last week and used these as new homes for some of the plants. Let’s see how they survive outside.
I haven’t put the geraniums out yet, I think they need another week or so, as they are quite small. Can’t wait until they all flower as it will give some colour to our very green garden.
Cooked a roast this evening and my daughter helped me clear up. I’m going to relax now as I’m shattered.
Some people need stimulation from ‘other people’ and ‘things’ to be happy (group A) and some people can be happy from just being with themselves (group B). I think we have two in each group in our house. I’m in group B so have just flown out the house for some time to myself, the only message being was that I’ll be back in an hour, but really I could probably benefit from a week on my own (I’m probably overreacting).
My brain is in overload and I’m suffering as a result. I need some time alone; some silent time to recharge.
I’ll post this now in case I read it back later and delete it. It’s important for my journey that I record how I am feeling so that I can also show the steps I took to make things better.
The funny thing is that I felt better after just 20 minutes of walking and my headache miraculously disappeared.
I scanned my list of audiobooks and switched on Rangan Chatterjee’s book The Stress Solution. I’m not listening to every word (as I’m writing this and also trying to look where I am walking), but the words he’s saying are helping.
Someone just walked by me and said ‘morning’ and I said the same back. It’s actually the afternoon, so he’s obviously been out for a while.
I might post an update later, but right now I’m just going to keep walking…
I struggled to save and post this blog so it’s been over an hour now. I’m getting a bit peckish. Time to go back home.
How do you know if you are making progress towards your goal? I truly believe that you can just feel it. Today I actually got a glimpse of living with more space around me, as things are starting to fall into place. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve had a few days off work or if it’s because I had some solitude time. Probably a combination of both.
Solitude
This afternoon the sun felt hot so I sat on the small table and chairs outside. No one disturbed me and it was very peaceful.
I looked up the word solitude and read a few articles, which made me like the word even more. A couple of sentences in particular stuck in my mind from dummies.com:
Solitude allows your body to catch up with your mind
Solitude allows your brain to rest
I think I need a lot of solitude time.
The garden and conservatory
I have paid more attention to the garden since lockdown began, than I have in the last 12 years of living here. I tried out a new ‘hose end’ that I bought and used it to wash the patio. I’ve never tried doing anything like that before and it was very satisfying using the pressure to get rid of the dirt and moss between the slabs.
It made me sad to think that my husband wants to get all of this patio dug up and put some decking down. No decision has been made yet, so I thought I would give the patio some love and attention to see if it might change his mind about landscaping the garden this year. I don’t think I could be dealing with that sort of upheaval at the moment… maybe next year. I want him to enjoy sitting in the garden though so I’m trying to make it look nice.
I have probably said this a few times (as I’m continually moving things about) but I really do think that I’ve now got the conservatory the way that I want it. It’s a great feeling. I can now go in there to read, think, make calls, write, work, exercise or just relax. We haven’t bought any new furniture for the room; we’ve just used the two old but comfortable armchairs. The room is bright, warm and cosy during the day and because the chairs are facing the garden it has a great view.
Two comfortable armchairs
More gardening tomorrow if the weather is nice. If not, I have plenty to tackle in the house.
I have a few days off work and it’s an amazing feeling. After a well-earned lie in this morning, I decided to not ‘clock watch’. I just went with the flow of the day. Everyone else was working or schooling so I was able to just potter about.
Clearing freezer space
I didn’t intend to reorganise the freezer, it just happened. I was trying to find some bread for toast. Every time I go to the freezer for some bread, I realise that I have half-used loaves all over the place. The door flaps have fallen off the top two shelves as well so anything small you put on those shelves (bags of chopped up onions, peppers, chillis) just fall out when looking for something.
Freezer before decluttering
I’d had enough of searching for items, and that moment felt like the right time to do a bit of organisation. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time with my hands in there, as it was obviously very cold and I couldn’t keep the door open for long, so I did it in a few stages in between other jobs in the kitchen.
My freezer is now a bit more organised as each drawer has a different category: veg; meat and fish; bread and rolls; ice creams and lollies; other (chips, waffles etc). One of the top two shelves is for things we’ve chopped and bagged up and the other one is for ice packs and ice cubes. Here’s how it looks now…
Freezer after decluttering
Making space in the main dining room area
I moved the furniture around… again… between the dining room and conservatory to make more space. I was determined to put the armchair back into the conservatory. I didn’t want to make it too crowded in there but it fitted perfectly. It also gave us more room to walk round the dining room table. It’s made a huge difference to the dining room area and it feels like we’ve gone back to before lockdown when it was tidy. Another amazing step for today.
Time to write
I sat in my tidy conservatory and wrote.. and it felt like the best moment I had had all day. I couldn’t type my thoughts down quick enough. This moment didn’t last long, but I did manage to write a 500 words outline for a non-fiction book idea. I soon got interrupted which marked the end of my pottering about for today.
The conservatory has become a nice place to be and very warm when the rest of the house feels cold. It’s attracting everyone else in the house and because I wasn’t working today, I found it difficult to say I needed some time to myself. Well, actually I did say it, but it didn’t seem to work. At the moment, the only place it’s possible to experience solitude is the bathroom!
Since the beginning of lockdown I’ve been getting a bit more sleep as the morning routine is totally different. There are no packed lunches to prepare and no one is rushing around trying to get out of the house, meaning that I can get up later. I’ve had the occasional sleepless night but most of the time I can drift back off to sleep. This morning was different, I was wide awake at 3am with so much going around in my head and sleep wasn’t coming naturally. So, just before 5am I gave up and went downstairs for breakfast.
Being so quiet and peaceful, I was able to engage with my mind and actually hear myself think. This kind of quiet is like the peacefulness of midnight but has added positivity of having the whole day ahead.
The rest of the morning was busy but quiet as we all had work to do, and by mid afternoon I was starting to get tired so I decided to have a nice warm bath with candles and listened to a meditation track. This really helped with how I was feeling. Y
Revising my 2020 challenge
I’m just over a third of the way through my decluttering challenge and the last couple of days has got me thinking about where I’m going with it. I never got round to posting a reflections blog at the end of April like the other months so now is a good time.
I thought I knew what I was trying to achieve which was to declutter or put a new process in place every day and then blog about it; however, I don’t think that had the right balance. Some days I fit so much in and other days (like yesterday) it just isn’t possible, and that’s ok. No one is judging or monitoring me and there’ll be no finish line and prize at the end. This year is all about me and how I am feeling about the space around me. That’s when it hit me about what I’m trying to do.
I needed these few days to reflect and to realise that it’s not all about getting something done every day. It’s not even about having an end goal (although I really do want to have made progress by the end of this year). It’s about me feeling better every day about my surroundings and how a clear space gives me a clearer mind. It’s about me doing what I want to do when I feel like doing it, without feeling guilty.
So, my revised challenge for 2020 is simply…
Clearing space in my home, my garden and my mind.
Clearing space can be decluttering, cleaning, meditation, reading, writing, thinking and so on.
I will still write every day but there will be no pressure for it to be about decluttering or processes. What I write will be focused on what I’ve done that day towards my challenge which can relate to anything that is giving me clear space.
I hope you will continue to follow me on my journey.
Self-care is something that I’ve heard a lot about recently so I thought I’d treat myself to some of it today. Do you ever do that? The main reason is that I woke up with the same tension headache that I’ve had for a couple of days so I gave myself permission to do what I felt like doing today whether it involved decluttering or not.
I always do loads around the house in terms of housework and clearing up anyway. Looking after myself is important and it won’t slow my progress. It’ll just enable me to enjoy the journey a bit more as well.
After breakfast, I sat in the garden for a short while flicking through a book that I recently ordered called It’s not ok to feel blue and other lies by Scarlett Curtis…
I’d heard that it was a good read with honest and inspirational stories that real people have written about mental health. I didn’t get to read much but as it’s the sort of book you can dip into, I’ll just leave it by the bed.
Nap time 😴
I also had a bit of a nap in the afternoon… just twenty minutes or so. Well done to me. It felt really good.
A bit of exercise
I also wanted to catch up on some of Gary Barlow’s crooner session duet videos on Facebook so did this whilst on the exercise machine. Fifteen minutes went by really quickly.
Slowing down
So, all in all I tried a slower pace today; going with the flow as much as I could. The ‘almost tidier’ kitchen made me feel much happier. I also purposely put back into the cupboard, the items that I needed to make decisions about yesterday. I really wasn’t in the mood for decision making and it really didn’t need to be done today. It certainly made life easier when I was making dinner. There was so much of the kitchen surface to actually work on.
Homemade meat pie
Dinner was homemade meat pie which (although not as good as my mums) always goes down well with the family. The whole thing was gone in about ten minutes.
Homemade meat pie
Movie time
I watched Sliding Doors with my daughter this evening as she hadn’t see it before. It was a video tape copy! I have loads of videos and can’t part with them as most of the films aren’t free on Netflix or Prime so there is no point throwing them away. My daughter was asking me how video tapes work. It’s so different to how we watch things these days.
Does anyone else still own a video recorder and video tapes? They do take up a lot of storage space so I suppose eventually I will have to get rid of some or all of them.
Last week’s mass kitchen decluttering left a lot of surface clutter including items with no home. It finally got to me today and I had to take action. I sorted out some of the remaining cupboards – the top three shelves of the food cupboard (below) and a corner one that I haven’t quite finished yet.
Today was one of those days where I woke up a bit achy round the neck and shoulders which was giving me one of my tension headaches. It was probably all the gardening over the last couple of days or it could be the hot sun on my head where I wasn’t wearing a sun hat. I really wanted to just get on with things around the house but my body and head was telling me something different.
After breakfast I asked my husband to massage my neck and shoulders using this lovely lemon, orange and bergamot oil that I bought ages ago but we don’t use. It just sits on the fireplace collecting dust. The smell was divine and the massage really helped my headache.
Planning our next steps in the garden
We spent the next few hours as a family discussing the projects that we could do around the house and also what else we could do in the garden. My daughter found an app that could help us plan it and before long she had some of it designed. We also talked about decking and a shed. It’s early days as some of it might have to wait until lockdown is over. It’s good to have the family on board, even though I usually don’t involve them and just like to get on with things myself. I’m slowly realising that I can’t do it all and they really want to help. Sometimes it’s just at a different pace to me.
The girls wanted to help in the garden today so I suggested some weeding. I don’t think that was interesting enough for them and before long they were asking questions about the hidden water fountain in the middle of the garden and poking around.
When I say that the fountain was hidden, it wasn’t intentionally hidden, it’s just that small stones had covered the nozzle and the whole area was covered with mud and stones (so I suppose you could say that it needed decluttering). I couldn’t remember how it worked either. My husband had built it many years ago and neither of us have paid much attention to the garden since then so we left the water feature unplugged for when we had more time to look into it. Lockdown and the good weather is starting to change our focus on what jobs need doing, and the garden is getting more attention. The children are talking an interest too and got very inquisitive about how the water feature worked.
Attempting to fix it
I switched on the plug in the conservatory to see if we could see any water coming out of the area outside. The girls moved a few stones and we noticed a little bit of water. It was at that point that my husband came out into the garden to see what we were doing. He was pleased that the girls had shown some interest in fixing the fountain and said that they could help to clear the area, take the water/mud/stones out, check the pump, and refill the container. They were very enthusiastic and basically fixed the whole thing themselves with our guidance (well, hubby’s guidance really, as I didn’t have a clue. I just got things when anyone needed them, helped to lift things, and got my hands dirty).
Stages of the process
It was a hot day so perfect weather for having your hands in cold water and getting muddy (which of course we all did in the end). It was hard work and fiddly, but the girls did so well. One of them now knows in detail how the pump works and how to adjust it etc. (not that we want to be taking it apart again so soon).
The end result
Here is a picture this evening of the water fountain working, and the solar lantern that I put in a few weeks back.
Water fountain and solar lantern
It’s all starting to come together in our garden. I think it could do with a few flowers in this little area now.
Sandra Madeira 