small successes

I saw this new "Faith and Family Live" weekly event linked at a friend's blog: Small Successes. I think this is a great idea! How often do I get down on myself because "I didn't get anything done today". Ann recently posted, Do the tasks...so as not to hinder, which I have been prayerfully considering. HappyMama also posted an appropriate deep thought recently: "It is so much easier to make a list of all the things I need to do than to actually start doing the things on my list." While I thinking about my "small successes" will help me in a normal week, all of these ideas together pushed me to git 'er done and, thanks to my helpful husband, I have one BIG success to share!

On Friday last week I felt like I was drowning...suffocating...being smothered by the stuff in our house. The guest bed in our computer room has been a major problem. Last year, it went from being a mess to immaculate. However, it is such a large flat surface - perfect for collecting stuff since it is hardly ever used - and it was a mess again. The stuff was like giant Alice in the White Rabbit's house. We'd tried to "pull it out the chimney" and like the Dodo, I was ready to resort to a more "energetic solution" and "burn the house down" in order to get rid of the monster. Fortunately, Adam was ready and willing to cooperate and on Saturday we started working on a better solution.

I didn't take a before picture of our spare room, but an after picture will show...no more bed. Since it only gets used once or twice a year, Adam and I moved the bed up to the attic. In order to do that, the attic had to be cleaned. Our trash tote is full and there are piles of old computers, monitors, and printers around it. We fed the burn barrel all day long. Adam's car is full of old stereo equipment, a youth bed frame, and several other boxes full of things to go to the thrift store. There is still a lot for me to go through, but the attic is well on its way to being a nice retreat.



We set up a media corner where Adam's old Nintendo and Playstation are plugged in rather than hidden away in a dusty box. I have all our books and CDs on marriage, parenting, and motherhood on a nicely decorated bookshelf. We have a card table set up so that we can get back to doing puzzles in the evenings. This is good for us, but it will also be good for our kids even though it means that the attic is no longer their playroom.



The attic playroom had seemed like a great idea, but it was a perpetual mess - out of sight, out of mind. We were not teaching the kids to clean up after themselves, take care of their toys up there, so the mess and the messy habits were spilling out of the attic and down into their bedrooms, so when it was time to go to bed...we had to find their beds. Since all the kids books and art supplies were already in the spare room / office along with all of our other "homeschooling" materials it made sense to transform the room to a space where we can read, work, and play together.



This will be much better than shutting myself in there to print, copy, gather books and supplies and drag them downstairs...and then find the time and motivation to drag it all back up to put it away. That just wasn't happening. We were either not doing the things we wanted, doing them half-heartedly, or doing them and leaving the mess on the dining room table to deal with later. Clutter attracts clutter, so you can guess what that meant for our dining room.

Hopefully we've attacked the root of the problem and as 2009 progresses, we'll continue to tame the beast as we find a place for everything (even if that place is the trash or the thrift store) and begin to enjoy living - and breathing - in our house again.