I recently reached a point that I like to think of as 'comfortable simplicity'. I neither have too much or too little. My house is easy to clean, but not visually sterile. It suits our lifestyle. It is a place to live in and a place to relax. There are things I'd like replace: some of the decor and style a few of the storage areas so they seem more serene, but that will come with time.
Where are you in your decluttering journey?
I've pretty much reached that point of comfortable simplicity too, JuliaJayne. I have almost emptied my attic and have some of that stuff in our office to finish going through and getting out of here. I think I will always have odds and ends I'll let go of as time goes by and storage areas can always use a little straighten.
Overall though, I feel good about my decluttering journey and don't miss anything I've gotten rid of.
I feel like I'm still in the swamp. I've gotten most of the easy stuff out - the building supplies from old projects, the stuff that belonged to other people, the stuff we outgrew or needed to replace.
But in order to move to a smaller house, which is my goal, I need to downsize probably another 20-30%, and in order to make my life manageable I need to be better at enforcing my boundaries and saying no to people. Saying no to the vacation with my partner's parents was a good first step, but I really need to make my brother get his own mail drop instead of shipping, literally, heaps of packages here every year. I have an entire laundry basket of his packages - all fragile and temperature-sensitive, so I can't even stash them in the attic - sitting in my entryway, just from the last week or so. And he won't be here for 3 more weeks.
My main living area - kitchen, living room, bedroom are nearly to the comfortable simplicity stage. The "work" rooms - office and sewing/crafts are in a seriously clutter stage still. I am once again working furiously to get them in a neater state before I leave for 2.5 weeks.....
Kitchen and bathroom are pretty good, as are my bedroom and the hallway and landing. The lounge would be ok if I got the kids to get rid of the contents of a beach from there (rocks, shells, board games). The boy's rooms are okish for a little while, ds1's room is really good but ds2's needs a lot of toys chucking out. The dining room is ok, I know what needs doing and it's not much. The loft is my dh's domain so is tidy but overflowing with clutter (kind of the opposite of the rest of the house nowadays: messy but uncluttered!).
I think I started on here last Augustish and I have to say my house is better than it has ever been before: not perfect, still plenty to do but getting there.
My kitchen is (finally!) nice and streamlined, the living room is -almost- there. Bathroom is still way cluttered with makeup as I continuously try to find a way to store multiple types and is also easily accessible (it's a huge part of my job). My bedroom is my current dumping ground, and is definitely the final frontier of my apartment. I have a few piles here and there but with five minutes every few days they disappear really quickly. Problem is they reappear quickly too!
JuliaJayne: Way to go! That's what I am aiming for but I'm not there yet.
In the past year our house has become a lot better. Last June we had a new roof put on, had the foundation leveled, had the pad under the sun porch ripped out and replaced with more reinforcement. We hung wooden blinds in the sun porch and laid a floor over the concrete -- it's a lovely room now. We did some landscaping out front that had been deferred until the foundation issues were resolved (a nice path and planting bed.)
We had a tile guy come and (finally!) install a spectacular back splash over the (new) stove top. I finished painting the kitchen cabinet doors and hung them and painted the soffit.
There's still work to be done but I feel so much better about the house now. I've uncluttered a BUNCH of stuff, but not much of it is visible to the casual observer. Our house always looked fairly tidy -- the clutter was neatly hidden.
I've been bouncing around from room to room so I can't say that any one room is "done" but every one looks at least a little better. The house is never perfect and never will be, but if some one comes knocking at the door I can invite him or her in without qualms.
I've been doing the decluttering thing for about 3 years now and finally feel comfortable with what I've achieved. My goal was 'a place for everything and everything in its place' and I'm happy to say that I'm pretty much there. My family of 4 (2 adults and 2 children) have what we need, and want, and are actually making use of everything. I don't think I've bought art supplies for the kids for a couple of years, and they are almost at the end of the stash of notebooks and scrap paper we've accumulated. We're reading our own books and wearing out clothes and shoes before buying new ones. Of course, now we've reached this stage, we're planning on moving out of the city, to a bigger house (with some land and it would be VERY hard to find something smaller!) so I will have to work extra hard not re-accumulating stuff to fill it :-)
I don't think comfortable simplicity is attainable here until the kids are older. I'll settle for waving rather than drowning!
Same here JuliaJayne...although just about the time I think I am through with de-cluttering, I find something else that can be down-sized or disposed of! :) Like anything else, it is an on-going process and (for me) changes due to circumstances and taste. I LOVE the fact that at any moment someone can drop in and I don't have the frantic panic that I used to have trying to get the house tidy...it is in a constant state of "comfortable-tidiness,"...but never looks uncomfortable or sterile. I like that everything has a spot and when you need it, it is there...(well, unless my honey forgets to put it back, but he's working on that! :)
*waves at Charity, sends her a virtual Lush bath bomb* *grin*
With this house, I like that we've restored the wood trim when we've had the money to do so: it's an older house with built-ins, and the rooms look finished even with very little in them. DS's room is a wreck, but the doors close and it's not actually a fire hazard, so I'm resigned to its being in a state until he moves out at the end of this summer.
ArtGal, I like not getting stressed out when someone drops in. With less stuff my house always looks clean.
our shed-home is a long way from finished....but it is simple and comfortable and clean and spacious.
we have everything that we need, and the things that we do have, are beautiful things that we enjoy using or having around us.
i am still slowly paring books. the workshop still needs attention. but on the whole, my focus is maintenance, after two leisurely years of decluttering.
i was happy to find recently, that upon suddenly requiring a temporary wheelchair, that i had ample room to wheel about in our home....i needed no special accommodations.
in a more crowded space, life would have been very difficult.
also, the lack of clutter meant we could have plenty of visitors without my husband having to run around cleaning and tidying.
I am at the point where I am trying to get rid of "the little things". I still have lots of small things that need to go (some handbags, shoes, CDs, books, clothes I don't like).
I'm not sure whether I'm at the point of comfortable simplicity (I love that expression!!) yet, but if not, then I'm definitely getting there. I also define it as neither too much stuff nor too little, and more importantly, using and loving everything I own.
I can still think of things I don't want but can't bring myself to part with, things I want to replace but can't afford to, things I want to have but can't bring myself to buy, things I'm not sure are worth keeping but always seem to convince myself I'll find a use for them...
It's not so much a question of "problem areas" with me (although I have one closet that needs constant reorganizing) as with paring down overall. I tend to organize first, ask "do I really need all this?" later, and usually by that point things are already neatly put away, so why mess with a good thing?
When we first put our house on the market last year, we put a lot of stuff in a storage unit. I am a chronic de-clutterer and did not think I had that much stuff to begin with. It is amazing how quickly you can fill up a storage unit though! Over the summer, we "rescued" some stuff from storage, but most of it we did not need or use. When we decided to stop paying for storage, we took most of it to a second hand store. A year later, we hear the occassional comment about our uncluttered home and yet all are belongings are here! My husband is amazed I still find things to get rid of. My mantra is to "keep what I use, and use what I keep." I still have a way to go for that though.
I too love that expression "comfortable simplicity". Every change of home and life stage requires re-adjustment, and I feel I have finally adjusted to our (much) smaller home so now it is a matter of maintenance. Due to space constraints and unfortunate open shelving, we do have a messy look to some areas, but through steady assessment we are able to maintain a happy medium. I still hanker after more living space though. I don't know if I will ever get past that, unless we actually move to a place with, I don't know, an actual bedroom.
I agree with the positive feedback on "comfortable simplicity"; it's a very describing expression albeit still unknown to me. But I crave it desperately. Right now I'm back home again but can't start re-decluttering with full force as there are more pressing matter to prioritize, but I'll try the best I can.
For one, it's more about creating storage that works in certain areas such as the kitchen, above decluttering there. In other places it really is about chucking things out and I think it is sometimes almost easier to focus on the spaces that resemble in their usefulness the kitchen (i.e. organize them properly so each object has its place); that's what we need and it sets the physical limitations to what other crap we can store. Hope you understand how I mean it.
I don't think comfortable simplicity is attainable here until the kids are older. I'll settle for waving rather than drowning!
I love that! I'm in the same place - trying to at least purge/organize my own stuff and ignore the kids/dh's as much as possible.
I'm trying to teach the kids to simplify, but ds is adhd and has trouble, dd likes the idea, but likes her "stuff," and youngest dd had the problem that her siblings and my in-laws gift her too much!
I'm still far from that! :(
I have taken a lot of steps backwards. Plus, after my MIL died, we had to go get the rest of her stuff. So, even though I'm not back to square one, it sure feels like it. Her daughters are taking some of it, but many of her things, that need to be sold, are still here. Most of her photographs (that my husband and his sisters will have to divide up) are still here.
Plus, I still have a lot I need to get rid of, and I have to think in terms of selling some of it.
The house we are living in is my MIL's house. We either have to sell it and split the money that is left with my husband's sisters, or we have to buy it ourselves. My husband wants to do that. However, it doesn't look good, because our overall income is not very high. We have already been turned down by our bank, so we are having to go through someone in a nearby large city who deals with loans for lower income people.
So, I imagine we will have to sell, find a place to rent (that will take cats), and move.
So, yeah, I guess I'm back to square one when I think about it. I still have a lot of stuff to go through. I don't know if I have the energy to do it. Ugh!
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