The power of de-cluttering

Somewhere on the interwebs recently I saw a blog post that had a teaser that was to the effect of "Are you totally neurotic and stressed about your house?"  Obviously, I clicked on it.  It had a bunch of little pieces of wisdom to help you become less neurotic, and one of them really stuck with me.  It basically said that the world (and blogs and Pinterest in particular) is full of things telling you how to make your house better and what you need to buy in order to do it.  So true!  Spending time on all these home improvement blogs can suck you into this black hole of judging every single thing in your house and then being bummed about not being able to afford to do something about it.  So this piece said instead of dwelling on what you can't do - simply de-clutter.  Just looking around at the stuff that's taking up space in your house and getting rid of some of it can open up space you didn't realize you had, and make the space feel completely new, without spending any money at all.

In that spirit, I decided to tackle a project that I'm sort of embarrassed to admit to.  I moved into my house about 4 1/2 years ago, and had put a bunch of my junk up on the second floor, in the storage area, and also just scattered all over up there.  Much of it never having even left the moving box it came here in.  Since I don't use that space much except as a guest bedroom, it didn't really bother me on a day to day basis, but then when I read this little nugget of wisdom, I just thought "I should really get on that already."

I'm not good at doing these big cleaning projects in big chunks, so I've been working on it for a few hours for the past couple of weekends.  Here's what it looked like when I started.  First, the attic storage area:

Then the main bedroom/office area:

In fact, it was actually a little bit worse than this.  In the second picture above, there were actually about 2 or 3 cardboard boxes that used to sit tin the corner to the right of the desk that I had just cleaned up before taking this picture.  But still - LOTS of room for improvement.

Once I had cleaned those boxes out and gotten some of that other stuff off the floor, I realized that I could maybe be making better use of the space by re-arranging the furniture.  (The de-cluttering principle's first payoff!) I actually tried to be really scientific about choosing how to set it up.  I spent a couple hours first measuring everything and then drawing out to-scale maps of how the furniture could be set up.  Turns out I can't get that creative with the furniture arrangement up here because of where the outlets and phone jacks for the computer are. 

So in the end, the biggest change I made was to move the desk over to the area facing the two floor-level windows.  Not a big deal, but it's amazing how much more open it feels up there.  Then I kind of scooted the futon a couple feet to the right to create more room to put that standing lantern lamp between it and the desk.  That really helped to lighten up a dark corner.  Here's a few pictures of this mid-point in the process - some cleaning has been done, furniture has been re-arranged, but still a ways to go.

I had to let this sit for a few days before I got up the energy to truly tackle the rest of the de-cluttering.  I don't think of myself as a packrat, so I had not really realized how much s*** I have.  Just the most random stuff.  Bacon wallet?  Check.  Ringo Starr hat?  Check.  Collection of magazines about 15-year-old Prince William?  Double check.  (In the interests of full disclosure, these are all items that I have in fact decided to keep for the time being.  I know, I know - I've learned nothing.)

Anyway, cleaning once again resumed this past weekend, so I've got the finished product to show off now.

And the attic:

I'm definitely making much better use of all the space in there now.  Things are organized, labeled, and purged.  There's still this corner in the back where the drywall hole from the gas line installation is.  Once that's fixed up I'll be able to use that corner too.

I'm sure that I'll be doing much more up here.  It's kind of a blank canvas now, with all the crap cleared out.  Exciting!  I'm still mostly focused on the main level, but it's nice to start thinking about possibilities for the upstairs too.