a snail's pace

It's been a while since I did an update on the status of my decluttering. Despite my best intentions of giving you daily updates, I've given you...nearly none.

However, I am pleased to say that I am continuing to declutter, and I have been making progress. I am less pleased to admit that it's going much slower than I'd like, and that I am very frustrated because I feel like I spend most of my time on maintenance rather than on progress. This is probably why there haven't been many picture posts about it; I'm still working on the bar area of the basement, and I still have a lot of work to do there.

I am very pleased to tell you that the upstairs remains decluttered and clean, and we haven't let it get out of hand. It is what I consider 'company ready', and has been since I finished it some weeks back. This is outstanding, really, and I feel so much happier and less muddled. I actually spend most of my time upstairs now (where it was the opposite before), and I sort of view the basement as this evil, filthy dungeon. Which is sad, because my basement is really pretty awesome. But never fear, we'll get it back to 'awesome' soon.

Battling my frustrations on this project has been difficult. I am frustrated that it is taking so long; I keep telling myself it is like weight loss. I didn't pack on the clutter in a day, and I'm not going to dump it in a day either. This is at least a decade of clutter, if not more. Of course it's going to take time to sort through. But I am a very impatient person, so it's been rough. Sometimes I'm not very nice to my family because I'm frustrated, and that's something I need to work on as well. When you add in two frustrations; for example, the fact that I'm sick right now and not making much progress on top of the fact that progress is slow to BEGIN with...well, I sort of turn into a witch with a capital B.

The other thing that is a huge struggle for me is the fact that I am fighting to focus on this ONE project, and this one alone. My nature is to take on fifty projects at once, and then I never finish ANY of them, and I sort of live in a state of perpetual low-grade frustration. I'd like to break that cycle...I'd like to NOT be frustrated all the time, and I'd like to actually FINISH some of these projects of mine. So I'm trying something new. But trying to focus on one thing and one thing only, to completion, goes against my very nature, and this is making me a mite cranky too.

It's a wonder my family hasn't deserted me yet, frankly.

Pictures will come, sometime soon. In the meantime, I am doing my best to keep moving forward, and to pat myself on the back because I'm maintaining the work I DID and still making progress. Even if it is slow like snail.