Summer Cleaning

     The organizing bug has hit me hard this summer.  It started with a homeschool moms meeting.  The lady's house that we met at was spotless; not just clean, but perfectly put together and coordinated. You couldn't even tell she homeschooled, or had kids for that matter! So I come home to my crowded little house, where no one would ever assume I wasn't a homeschooling mom, because all of our books and etc. is right there in the open as soon as you walk in the door.  Then there's all the other stuff here there and everywhere, because really and truly I am running out of space. So I started feeling a little discontented with my house.
     The second thing that happened was we got someone to come and look at our broken heat pump.  It turns out that a very expensive part is broken. We had the money to get it fixed, but unfortunately it's money that had been earmarked to pay for a new bathroom floor, since the current one is rotting away. I went from being discontented to very frustrated. It felt like everything in the house was getting worse and worse, and there wasn't anything I could do about it.
     That's when I had to stop and take a look at myself, and say, "What are you doing? Stop comparing and focusing on what you don't have, and think about what you do have, and what you can do."  First of all, I am way too eclectic to ever be perfectly coordinated, and I really don't want a bigger house. The size of our house is fine, it's just the amount of stuff filling it up that has gotten out of hand. I would like to have the bathroom floor fixed, but I can't do anything about that right now. What I can do right now is get rid of the extra stuff that is cluttering up the house, and making it seem crowded, and organize the stuff that I want to keep.
     I started with my bed room since it is hands down, the worst room in the house.  After buying shelves to store my fabric and other sewing paraphernalia, I managed to fill up five garbage bags of trash, as well as a huge box of stuff to donate to Good Will, from my bedroom alone!  I really am not a hoarder, and I do regularly go through my stuff, but this time I went though everything, including my file cabinet which had not been sorted through in years. It was bad.  I now feel sooo much less anxiety when I'm in my room.  Just getting everything clean and ordered has been huge, but now I want to get every thing looking pretty. But before I can do that, I need to tackle Anna's room.  Since I moved the twins out, her room has turned into a pack-rat's paradise.