Tag: 30 days

28 Simple Days ~ February Recap

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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!

We are in the last week of February now and I thought that I would give you a better insight on how things have progressed this month with my new habit.

To recap:  I wanted to spend the month of February putting things away.  And to be able to put things away, they need a place.  I like order.  Order gives a calm space in the chaos that is life, in my humble opinion.  Also, I am a control freak.  You can’t control life most of the time, but you can control your response to all the things.  Hence, I like order.

One of the first things that I realized at the beginning of the month – and I don’t know why I was so shocked and surprised by this – is that I needed to step up my decluttering to make this happen.  Now if you’ve been hanging around with me for very long, you know I am not a novice when it comes to decluttering and sending things away to live with a new family.  I’ve been doing this diligently for over eight or nine years now.  It’s a never ending process.

Even though I mentioned it in the last post, I still didn’t realize the scope of how much stuff I still need to go through and get rid of.  You can see my last donation haul here, and it’s a direct result of sending away the things that I know I don’t want in my home anymore.  But.  You knew there was a but coming didn’t you?  This is going to take me a lot longer than 28 days to complete.  I have worked every single day of February somewhere in my house for at least five minutes decluttering something.

That my friends, is the gist of it all.  Very tiny chunks of my day.  I get overwhelmed very easily when it comes to all the things.  First there are a LOT of things.  If I decide to KonMari my house, things are going to go horrifyingly wrong in a hurry.  You’ll notice when I do KonMari something, it’s a micro segment of what normal people would do.

I KonMaried my purses and I was actually okay with that.  It was a task that I could carry out and accomplish within a reasonable time frame.  Otherwise, things would be pulled out and piled around my house for weeks.  That’s seriously not an exaggeration.  Ask Denton how I know this.  Actually don’t, he might tell you in detail.  I need limits.  So I don’t declutter my kitchen.  I declutter a DRAWER in my kitchen.  It’s something that I can do while I’m cooking supper and not turn my kitchen into a disaster zone that won’t allow me to function.

Every day this month I have decluttered something so that I can put things where they belong.  Like this:

I spent about 2 minutes going through my wooden spoons, culled out what I knew that I never reach for and stuck the lot in a crock that was gathering dust.  Now it has a function and a reason to sit there and be pretty.  My favorite reason for having beautiful things.

I am learning new things about myself throughout this process too.  I am not the type of person to buy all matching containers and then come home from the grocery store and switch all the cereal into the beautiful matching containers.  I just don’t have the patience for it.  But I also do not like looking at the cat treat box that comes from Wal-Mart.  We need a safe, out of Batman’s reach container for them, but I hate those plastic, ugly containers that they come in.  When I found this guy, I snatched him right up.

Form and functionality.  I love it.

As with January’s habit builder, I didn’t plan to have my entire house sorted out by the end of February.  This year, I am trying to teach myself routines that I can stick with forever.  This way, once I have my belongings sorted out and culled down to only what I love and know that I want to clean every day, it will be easier to spot newcomers who do not belong.  Because let’s face it.  Things are not going to miraculously stop coming into my house.  I see new things that I want to try all the time.  But once I determine that they are just not a good fit, hopefully it will be easier to send them on their way.

I found permanent places for quite a lot of stuff this month, but there is still a lot more to go through.  I have many, many lovely things that I’ve collected over the past 25 years, but as lovely as they are, most of them are going to grace someone else’s home soon.  I am not aiming to be a minimalist, but I definitely want to have less stuff.  

I want what I think most people want:  A comfortable, clean and welcoming home.  Now that I’ve finally figured out for myself how to get that, I am on a mission to get it done.  Five minutes at a time, clearing out the clutter to make a place for everything, so that everything can be put in its place.

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

28 Simple Days ~ February

Published on by TracieLeave a comment

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

30 Simple Days ~ January Wrap Up

Published on by TracieLeave a comment

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 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.  So for the first 30 days of 2019 I decided that I would get the worst of the tasks marked off my mental list:  The Dishes.

Hello again!  Did you think that I abandoned my mission for the month of January?  Nope.  I’m still here, plugging away at it.  I just did a horrible job of keeping you informed of how everything was going.  Hopefully, February will be better.  But, since it’s the 1st of February TODAY, and you don’t even know what I plan to work on for the month, it isn’t looking encouraging is it?  😂  I’ll try to get that post up tomorrow.

So…… How did it go for the past 30 Simple Days?  Okay.  Did I clean my dishes every.single.night?  Nope.  Did I wish I had every.single.morning that I got up and there were still dishes in my sink?  Absolutely.  But, my kitchen has actually stayed cleaner this month than it ever has.  I learned an invaluable lesson while I was building this new routine into my life.  The more often you do something, the less time it takes.  Time is a high dollar commodity in our lives right now.  And I feel like I’m cheating and gaining more time by cleaning my kitchen every day.

One thing I managed to actually accomplish this month was running my dishwasher every day.  This buys me time.  I might not have gotten every dish in my house loaded up, suds up in the sink, rinsed and put away, but I did run the dishwasher.  This caused a chain reaction day after day.  It took less time every time I did it, because there wasn’t two mountains worth of dishes waiting their turn in the dishwasher or sink.  Which gained me TIME.

Another valuable lesson I learned about myself in January is the fact that I need to get my dishwasher loaded up and the dishes cleared away as I’m making supper or it’s not going to happen.  Once supper is done, and we all make our plates, I am NOT going to go back into my kitchen to clean.  This may be a sad fact, but it is a fact.  So every night as I’m making supper, I load the dishwasher and wash what won’t go into it – like my iron skillets, or my giant stainless steel pans.  I might be left with my sink full of clean pans when we sit down to eat, but they are clean.  And I can live with that.

Don’t mind the dying rose in my kitchen window or the giant ring on my countertop.  This is real life people.  It gets done, eventually.

I also discovered that even after six plus years of decluttering my house, I still need to declutter more stuff from my kitchen.  I have a lot of pots, pans and dishware in my house which does hinder me in keeping up with the dishes.  Shhhh.  Don’t tell Denton I said that.  But, do I really need nine 18/10 stainless steel skillets?  No, but this is a downfall of shopping at yard sales and thrift stores.

I have to be diligent about the one in and one out method of shopping.  I can buy that All-Clad pan for $5.99 – which I did – but I have to replace one of my other pans with it.  Otherwise I am overrun with things.  Very nice, lovely, expensive things, but still things that need to be kept, cleaned and maintained.  That takes time.  Time away from my life that I am enjoying living.  No matter how lovely and expensive that All-Clad pan is, I don’t want to spend my valuable time cleaning and maintaining it more than is normal and good.  There have to be limits.

So, do I feel like I’ve established a new routine for myself?  Yes, yes I do.  I’m going to continue to try to do my dishes every single day from now on because I like having a clean kitchen and I also LOVE the fact that I have extra time on my hands because of it.  It’s a good feeling on both counts.

Now I’m ready to jump into February!

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!

You can find all of the posts in this series here.

Tracie

30 Simple Days ~ January 8, 2019

Published on by TracieLeave a comment

This year, I have decided that I need to dedicate 30 days each month 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.  So for the first 30 days of 2019 I decided that I would get the worst of the tasks marked off my mental list:  The Dishes.

I want to build a new habit for myself this year.  Clean my kitchen every night before bed.

I have to tell you that the first few days of this “make simple changes in my life” for the new year was stressful.  The very first day, all day, I felt like I constantly needed to be on the lookout for stray dishes that needed to be taken care of.  Immediately.

I finally calmed down and realized that the dish police were not going to break down my door at any moment.  Once I relaxed and got myself into a routine, I was fine.  This has always been my go to:  routine.  It keeps me calm.  Calm is good.  Otherwise, I want to go hide with a book and pretend I live there instead of dealing with my kitchen.  Or my laundry, floors, toilets, etc.  You get the idea.

My routine looks like this.  The first thing I need to do in the mornings is unload the dishwasher.  That way, when fairies or gremlins show up with random dishes, they have a place to go instead of hanging out on my countertop.  Where they attract other things, which causes a snowball effect, and by the end of the day chaos has ensued.  I just need to unload the dishwasher first thing.  Trust me.

Now that I have a place to put dishes all during the day, I can clean as a fix supper.  This simple addition to my new routine has been life changing.  Note:  Don’t hurt yourself rolling your eyes.  Of course I knew to do this.  I just never did it.  However, since I have actually been putting this concept into practice, I don’t have a mountain of things to wash after we’ve eaten every night.  Whatever doesn’t fit into the dishwasher has been soaking and is quick to clean and put away.  Amazing.

Now let’s get down to the nitty gritty.  Have I done this every single night?   No.  And I regretted it bitterly the next morning.

I stuck with this for the first six nights and then I fell off the wagon.  Hard.  I have no idea why.  I just decided that going to bed and dealing with it the next morning would be easier.  And at that very moment it was.  But, I am here to tell you that the next morning when I opened my eyes, I knew.  Before I even got out of the bed, I knew that my kitchen was not this lovely, clean space that made me happy just to walk into it.  I dragged my feet; I didn’t want to go in there.  I certainly did not want to go try to make coffee and breakfast for Liv at 6:20 AM.  Who wants to try to cook, when last nights dinner dishes are staring at you?  Not this girl.

So tonight, I heaved myself back onto the horse, and I cleaned my kitchen before I sat down to tell you all the gory details.  Is it perfect?  Absolutely not.  But I did it and it’s progress.  Progress is good.

Do you have plans to make simple changes in your life this year?  I would love to hear  about it!  I’ll keep you updated on how it’s all going during the month of January.  Let’s build some habits!

Tracie

30 Simple Days ~ January

Published on by Tracie1 Comment

When I posted a couple of days ago about my plans for this year, I knew that some of you were going to be expecting great and glorious systems or methods to get myself into gear for 2019.  And for that reason alone I’m going to lose a lot of you right out of the gate.  Because I don’t have plans for great and glorious things this year.  I was (and am) being very careful not to phrase this as a goal or a resolution.  Because I want this to be a permanent change in my life that I will stick with forever.  So here goes:

For January, for 30 simple days, I am going to do my dishes.  Cue the eye rolls.  I know.  How have a I gotten to be almost 46 years old and I don’t even know to wash my dishes every day?  I could give you all kinds of excuses, and that’s all they would be, excuses.  So we will skip over that part and save ourselves some time.

What started me towards this place, was a video I watched a few years ago.  I’m sure you’ve seen it, but just in case you haven’t I’ll link it here so that you can watch it yourself.  The full video is here if you are interested.  It is outstanding and you should definitely watch it.  Did this change my life overnight?  Nope.  But I actually started making my bed in the mornings.  Not every morning, but most mornings.  And you know what?  It makes me feel lighter on the days that I actually do it.  It surprises me when I walk into the room, sort of like I feel when I walk into a lovely, high end hotel, where everything is exactly where it should be.

I noticed that on the days I managed to actually get all of my dishes clean and put away, that’s exactly how I felt when I walked into my kitchen ten minutes later. Surprised, happy and lighter.  It also made me want to clean something else right away.  It must set off something in my brain, because cleanliness in one tiny spot in my house makes me want to clean another right away.

I decided to get a jump start and actually did this last night.

Unfortunately for me I have an obsession with dishes, so all of these did not fit into my dishwasher.  When I discovered this, (why was this a surprise to me?) did I contemplate shoving the extras into the oven or onto the dining room table where you wouldn’t be able to see them?  And then taking an after photo of the cleared and cleaned countertops?  I could have then run the dishwasher in the morning and no one would have been the wiser, right?  Oh, hello!  Have we met?  My name is Tracie and I have issues.  Have you noticed the title of my blog?

I actually set everything up so that I could hand wash them, then dry them and put them away. 

For me this isn’t about having a Pinterest or Instagram worthy kitchen.  Obviously.  This is about making a permanent change in my life.  Am I going to stick with it and do it every day?  I hope so.  Am I going to falter and go to bed with a stack of dishes in my sink some nights?  More than likely.  But.  This isn’t about perfection.  It’s about making small, what most people would say are stupid simple decisions in my life that I can build and grow on.  Life making my bed in the mornings.

So, I did my dishes last night. Every single one of them.  Even the two iron skillet’s I didn’t even know were sitting on my stove top until I was completely finished and ready to turn out the kitchen light.   I intend to do them all again tonight and every single night in January.  I may have pulled out all of my hair in frustration that people in my house insist on eating off of plates, using silverware and drinking out of glasses and then donated all but four of everything, but we’ll see.

If you are still with me by this point, don’t you love my helpers?

Neither of these things are being used as they were intended, but I love them.  They are serving the purpose I have given them.  Yes, they are antiques, and I will be upset when I eventually haphazardly destroy them, but in the meantime, I am using them in a way that makes me happy.  My elephant has 1966 on the bottom.

Anyone know what they were actually intended for?  I’m guessing flower arrangements.

Do you have plans to make simple changes in your life this year?  I would love to hear  about it!  I’ll keep you updated on how it’s all going during the month of January.  Let’s build some habits!

Tracie

30 Simple Days

Published on by Tracie2 Comments

This year I have decided to make permanent, simple changes in my life.  As the calendar year rolls onward, I will become 46 years old in January.  I’m going to say become, because it sounds like I’m embracing it, right?  You can’t stop the flow of time without dying, and I have a lot of living left, so this is how I’m choosing to think of it.

All of that to say, that in the past 45 years, I have discovered quite a few things about myself.  One of the big things that seems small is that I do NOT like abrupt, big changes in my life.  They happen, but I don’t want to embrace them.  So I sat down towards the end of December and seriously thought about some of the things I would like to change in this coming year.

Over the years, I’ve read a lot of books, articles, and blog posts; I’ve listened to people’s opinions; I’ve even watched YouTube videos about how to create a habit.  What I have gleaned is this:  You need to be consistent.  You need to be accountable.  You need to focus.  Not necessarily in that order.

One of the things that I know now about myself, is that if I make small, almost not noticeable changes, I can stick with it.  So, taking in everyone else’s opinions, the books, the blog posts that people have written and all of the YouTube videos in the land, I’m going to spend 30 days each month making a small change in my life.  Small changes = big results over time.

I was very careful to not state this as a set of goals for myself.  I’ve set goals in the past, and failed miserably at them.  I am hoping that using these parameters I can make permanent, lasting changes that will transform my life, one small habit at a time.  And trick my brain into not understanding that they are actually goals.  Haha.

January 1st I’ll let you know what I have chosen to focus on for the first 30 days of 2019.  Are you making changes (shhh, goals) in the new year?  I would love to hear about it!