Accountability

I've decided to hold myself accountable for cleaning up those roadblocks in my life, and to that end, I'm publishing before, during, and after photos as I work on it. Starting, as I mentioned yesterday, with decluttering my house.

I have been working room by room, and following a basic method as I work. First I do a general pick-up, make the room somewhat liveable. Then I work around the room and declutter, pulling out stuff that can be sold or given away or packed up or otherwise moved elsewhere. I'm trying to get rid of a lot of stuff. This is really hard for me. More on that later, I'm sure. I'm getting better though. Once everything is decluttered, I've been giving the room a thorough cleaning...something my house hasn't seen in far too long. Dusting, cleaning ceiling fans, windows, walls, mopping, vacuuming, peeling stickers off walls (hey, I have two toddlers; stickers are everywhere!), etc. This process takes a lot longer per room than I had initially imagined; even in the rooms that were in pretty good shape, it takes a long time. I thought I'd at least be working downstairs by now. But I digress.

So far, I've finished four rooms: the master bedroom, the kids' room, the upstairs bathroom, and the upstairs hallway. Sadly, I don't have any before pictures of those areas, though perhaps in the future I will provide some 'afters' just for references' sake. And to make sure they don't get messed up again.

Right now I am actively working in our dining room, which is full of piles of clutters (mainly clothes and papers) that I pulled out of the four rooms I tackled previously.

Without further ado, here is the dining room, from all four corners:


Before

After


Before, with a bonus shot of our dog Pepper.

After. Obviously not a lot of work was done on this side of the room.


Before (yes, this is the room people see when they come to our front door. The horror! I know!)

After. Again, not much work was done to this side of the house. Hey, anybody in need of a crib mattress?



You might be wondering "what the hell is THAT?" That, my friends, is a leprechaun. A life-size stuffed leprechaun with a terrifying rubber face. A leprechaun that was gifted to us this past St. Patrick's Day by my brother, who works for the Village I live in as, yes, a garbageman (amongst other things). Yes, this filthy, frightening leprechaun came from the garbage. And yes, he's sitting in my dining room and greeting people when they come to the front door. I'm not sure WHAT I'm going to do with him. I'm thinking about repurposing him for Halloween somehow, or possibly gifting him to my friends at the Raven's Grin Inn, if they have a use for him. But I remain undecided, as it is dreadfully difficult for me to give up THINGS, especially unique things that I MIGHT have a use for some day, especially if they will possibly fit into my Halloween display or my Not House On The Rock House. Therein lies my problem.


Before

After. This is where the bulk of the work happened yesterday, so naturally it's the darkest / worst photo of them all! At least you can see that the tower of stuff has shrunk drastically. I culled a lot of the pile that you can see in the 'before' photo; a lot of that was stuff that migrated out of the bedrooms. It is now in boxes for the garage sale. I just need to decide where to store those boxes!