I was horrified.
My husband had rented the biggest U-Haul truck available, and it still didn’t fit everything!
Seriously?
After I had organized, packed, labeled, and even tried the “joy-sparking method,” you mean I still had too much stuff??
Moving was a big wake-up call for me. I thought I was pretty good at getting rid of the “extras” in our home, but clearly I was out to lunch when it came to spatial thinking.
Once we started settling into this lovely in-between house, it became glaringly obvious that we simply had too many things to manage comfortably in daily life. (I also wasn’t thrilled at the thought of dragging it all to the next house!)
The main living spaces are all organized and feeling fine.
But I had some dirty little secrets behind closed doors… specifically, the storage room, the garage, and the shed under the deck.
All were crammed full of stuff.
Honestly, I was too overwhelmed to even start.
Everything piled and stacked had been things we used and loved in our former home.
They carried memories, and some were even practical pieces of furniture we used every day ~ before.
My eye-opening moment came while I was reading another blogger’s review of Melissa’s new book. She noted that as a home decor blogger, keeping a lid on decor was a challenge.
“That’s me!” I thought. If I were Superman, decor would be my kryptonite.
Her method for taming the decor beast was to limit it to what would fit in one closet. Just reading the post made me jump up from my chair and decide to do something about it right away.
My husband was more than thrilled at the idea. At the bottom of the stairs and around the corner is a nice little storage room ~ which looked like this:
We avoided it like the plague, since trying to locate anything meant risking life and limb…
It’s a small room, but it fits our chest deep freeze and some shelving units.
I set out to see if I could fit all the decor into the wardrobe beside the freezer. It meant a fair bit of sorting, shuffling, and purging ~ but it didn’t take nearly as long as I had dreaded. After only a few hours, the place was shaping up into a room you could breathe in. This project then set off a domino effect into the other crammed rooms ~ in a good way.
We started listing items on our local buy-and-sell Facebook group, and little by little the garage and shed are clearing out, too… and, bonus! we have a little pile of cash to show for our efforts!
But since this is all about the storage room, do you want to see how it looks today? (Of course you do!) Remember how it started?:
Here it is now:
Ahh… you can walk in the door without bracing yourself for impact! :) I didn’t quite reach my goal of getting all the decor into the wardrobe…
But most of it is there.
It’s now easy to see and access when I need to grab something quickly.
The other side of the room has shelving units ~ with even some empty shelves!
This project has been more than just an organizing one for me, though. As I came upon former creative art projects and remembered where they used to hang, I realized I didn’t need to hold on to them just because they were special at one time. I discovered the freedom of letting go when something no longer brings me joy. For this next stage of life, I’m ready to freshen up our decor a bit and try some new things.
I don’t know what they’re going to be yet.
But I’m going to have fun researching. :)
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