Note: This post may contain affiliate links. Check out what that means to you here.
This year, I have decided that I need to dedicate 30 days each month (28 days in February!) to make simple changes in my life that I can stick with. Permanently. I didn’t want to set a bunch of goals and fail miserably at them a few months from now. Like I have done every year in the past.
Hello again! Are you ready for February? I can’t believe how fast January went by. Everyone I know was talking about how slow the month was, but I think it went by in a blink. Now let’s get on with my new ambition!
This month I’m going to spend my time working on putting things away. Everywhere I look in my house, there are random items just sitting about and I want that to change. I have a terrible habit of just setting something down to deal with later. It could be my contact solution when I put my contacts in, in the morning. Or my purse when I come home in the afternoon. The groceries after I shop for the week. The list could go on and on. I want everything in my house to have a place by the end of the month, so that I can put them away.
My reasoning is that if everything has a place, I will actually be more likely to put it away. And putting things away will help me to keep my house clutter free. I have discovered over the past long years of decluttering my house that if I put like things with like things, I am very surprised at how MANY things I can accumulate. For instance, I have at last count five colanders. I had seven but I made myself give two of them up. Because do you know how many of those colanders that I use? TWO. I tell myself that each one of them has a different purpose – and they actually do. One of my large colanders has very fine mesh on it and I use it when I drain hamburger meat. The others are fine for pasta and the like, but they allow the very tiny crumbles of hamburger meat to escape.
The issue I run into is this: justifying why I need to keep seven or even five colanders is giving me anxiety. Things take up space. Valuable space in my kitchen. As large as my house is my kitchen is relatively small. Keeping even five colanders is eating into a space that I could store my blender out of sight.
Here is the thing. Last year when we were on vacation, I fell in love with the sparseness of our vacation house. There was only the bare minimum of everything. And everything could be put away, out of sight. Between my parents, my brother’s family and our family we had eleven people in this beach house and it still didn’t feel crowded. Because basically everything had a place and could be put away if we wanted to. Did we? No, we were on vacation. But it could be put away. I vowed to myself that I was going to come home and clear my counters, so that I could have the same feeling at home.
The problem I found when I actually came home is that I have a lot of stuff. When you have a lot of stuff it’s difficult to put it away out of sight, since I have limited storage capacity.
Have you ever heard of Dana White? She has a blog called A Slob Comes Clean. I love her! (She has no idea who I am by the way) Her blog is amazing and you should definitely follow her if you want to delcutter your life. Her books are also amazing and I highly recommend them. I’ve been following her for years and she is such an inspiration to me. One of the things that she says all the time is that your house is a container. All of the spaces in your house are containers. Meaning that your space will only hold so much. I am slooooowly adjusting to this philosophy.
If I want my blender – which we only use about once a week – to live out of sight, I need a place to put it – out of sight. Which means that I need to declutter one of my spaces in my kitchen so that it will fit somewhere out of sight.
So my plan for the month of February is to declutter my house with the intention of being able to put things away. Am I going to be able to do my entire house in only 28 days? I highly doubt it, but my purpose with each month this year is to build a habit and a routine that I can stick with. Forever. I think I am slowly coming to grips with January’s habit of cleaning my dishes every day, so I hope that this will become a habit too. The funny thing that I never realized with habits, is that you do them ALL THE TIME. I don’t enjoy doing my dishes and I certainly don’t want to do them every day, but I love the results of actually sticking with it. I know that I will reap the rewards of teaching myself this new habit too.
Do you have plans to make simple changes in your life this year? I would love to hear about it! Let’s build some habits and routines!
You can find all of the posts in this series here.
Tracie