My house is a wreck. There, that’s off my chest. My wife and I have never been what you would call superb domestic engineers. Heck, we’re lucky if the kids got out the door to school with both shoes on and at least some of their books. Finding two matching socks was so hard that I was secretly thankful for the teenage trend of wearing mismatched socks (and flip-flops). We had so much clutter that I expected the producers of Hoarders to call us begging for a chance to put us on the show*.
Today I woke up with some sort of energy burst and started in on the house. My wife is out of town this week visiting friends, so this was a solo effort, prompted almost entirely by my belief that the clutter is killing my ability to create. Yah, yah, I’ve read it on every minimalist blog that I read. And I’m reasonably educated and know that my attention is zapped by piles of “stuff” all over the house.
So, I dug in. I moved stuff out, I threw stuff away, I made better decisions about storage, and I worked at trying for clean lines and peace in one room – what we call “the library”. The library is really our formal dining room that we have never had a dining table in because, hey, we’re not formal people (and we don’t expect the Queen to be dropping by for tea). I moved out some exercise equipment, some of the “stuff” that had been piling up, etc. And I found that the more I moved around the house working, the more energy I got. (Yes, I’ve read that, too, on a bunch of different blogs.)
Why am I posting this? Probably more as a reminder to myself that I need to get back into my old habits of organizing, paring down, sorting, etc. that I let slide during the last 18 months. A monument, if you will, to the fact that I do indeed know better.
Maybe I’ll work up the energy to tackle the studio tomorrow.
*Okay, maybe we’re not that bad, but still…


