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What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
- Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
What do you call the clutter in your home? You know what I mean. The box of five-year-old magazines. The tub of computer guts and various electronics. The pile of gift bags you just know you’ll use someday. read more…
I was in the kitchen digging around in a heavily cluttered utensil drawer. I have forgotten what I was looking for but I remember what I found; a sharp knife. After issuing a round of expletives that would have made a sailor blush, I wrapped my well-sliced finger and promptly (but carefully) removed all sharp objects from the drawer of death.
Afterwards, I stared in the drawer and wondered how to “fix” it. The drawer is large, perhaps 2 1/2 by 2 feet, so even after I removed any clutter from it, the contents would slide all over and become an annoying mess.
Then I found a solution. Daring Young Mom shared her favorite kitchen organizing tip: kits. She creates trays and boxes to keep like items together in cupboard and drawers. I think it’s a great idea and I am going to try it out. I’ll post pictures of the results.
Yesterday it was really cold here in Florida. OK, maybe not as cold as many other parts of the country, but nonetheless cold for us Floridians. The weather guy said that it was colder here than in Colorado.
I crawled out of my warm bed and headed to my office to begin working. The thermostat showed that it was below 60 degrees in my house. My instinct was to reach over and switch on the heat. But then something unexpected clicked in my head.
It will take hours for the temperature to get up to 70 degrees in the entire house, and I will only be using the office.
I immediately could imagine the effect that would have on our electric bill. I know this must sound crazy to some, but I refused to turn on the heater. Instead, I opted to plug in a small space heater under my desk and piled on several layers of clothes, fuzzy socks and tried to warm my insides with coffee and oatmeal.
Reducing our monthly expenses is one of our major goals for this year, eliminating ones we don’t need and lowering the ones we do. The electric bill has historically been our highest monthly utility bill and I feel good that my small sacrifice may help us achieve success.
Catherine over at NurturingHope.com has a cool method for decluttering your home without being overwhelmed! She advocates decluttering every day but only for 15 minutes. No more, no less.
I like to declutter to music so it made me wonder if I could come up with a 15-minute playlist. I hit “play” and start decluttering and when the music is done, so am I!
What songs would be on your playlist? Leave a comment with your favorite cleaning music and we’ll see what kind of playlists we can create!
As I sit watching today’s inauguration on CNN.com, I can’t help but feel a bit emotional.
With the way the economy is suffering, the housing market crashing, Americans losing equity and value in their homes, the unemployment rate rising, companies going out of business, and people losing their jobs, the future is full of uncertainty. Many households across the country are forced to take a hard and deep look at their finances.
I am filled with joy today as we swear in our new President. I normally try to steer clear of politics and I don’t blame the Bush administration for all our economic problems. But, I believe we need change. I truly hope that Obama can facilitate that needed change.
I am ready for change.
I’ve talked to a few people about clutter and one thing that I found interesting (and have suffered from myself) is that we sometimes get so used to our clutter that we have trouble “seeing” it.
Brandy took pictures of every room in our house from different angles. This was initially for documentation purposes to show “before” and “after”, but we noticed something more. After printing them out in color on regular paper, we were amazed at how much clutter we could now “see” through the camera’s eye. We knew we had clutter, but somehow seeing it in the picture it became so much more noticeable.
We looked at the printed pictures and then with a red pen, started circling areas we noticed. Now, we can tackle clutter we hadn’t noticed before and, each picture divides the house into managable areas we can fix individually without being overwhelmed by the whole thing.
We needed a plan-of-attack for paying off our debt. After reading articles from several sources, we found a common theme, the Dave Ramsey Debt Snowball. Although we could see the value in this approach, we decided to concentrate our efforts on the accounts by interest rate instead of account balance. A few months back, we had transferred a large portion of the balance on our “highest-interest” (16.99%) account to a lower interest promotion offered by another credit card. We locked the majority of the balance into a fixed 7.99%. Lucky for us this transfer also made this one of our lowest balance accounts.
With this approach we will pay the minimum payments to all of our accounts except the one with the highest interest, starting with the remaining balance from the 16.99% account. We will also take any money we have left over from our YNAB each month and make an additional payment on this account. Once this account is paid off, we will focus on the next one on the list again by highest interest rate. The first account should be paid off in the next few months, which will also give us the added psychological benefits of ridding ourselves of our first account.
If you are interested in a neat snowball calculator, take a look at this one at whatsthecost.com.
Erin Doland of Unclutterer.com has posted some helpful tips on getting started on your organizing.
Be specific. If you are not specific, you’ll never know when you have reached your goal.
Set a schedule. By doing the right tasks at the right time, you are more likely to succeed.
Create tasks. Tasks help you break down large projects into bite-sized doses and therefore make them easier to swallow.
Be diligent. Procrastination is the enemy of progress.
Accept slips and falters, and move on. Don’t give up after the first time things don’t go according to plan. Make the next day a fresh start.
Measure your progress. Being able to see before and after really gives you a sense of what you’ve accomplished.
Read Erin’s helpful post over at RealSimple.com.
One of my goals for 2009 is getting rid of the mountains of files and paperwork taking up space in our house. I want some way to scan them in (so I can shred the original) but also organize the scanned images in such a way that I can access whatever information I want quickly and easily.
I found a program online that looks like it has promise. It’s Paper Valet by Chocksett Software. Paper Valet promises to “easily scan, categorize, store, and retrieve your documents digitally.” The standard version is $24.95 and you can try it out for 30 days before buying.
Often when I have started something new, negative thinking makes me lose my passion and give up on whatever project I started. While I understand this phenomenon, and to some degree accepted it, I had never considered these negative thoughts to be clutter. Now, I see that they are.
Negative thoughts lie around, they get in your way, they sap your motivation, and weigh you down, just like clutter.
Over at the Real Simple blog, Erin Doland talks about learning stand-up comedy and the negative thoughts that almost made her quit.
She listed four thoughts that helped her through the process:
- In the beginning, it’s okay to be bad. In fact, a person should be bad when starting something new. There won’t be any sense of accomplishment if you start out awesome and remain awesome.
- It’s okay to fail, you can recover from failing at this task. Sure, my ego was bruised when I bombed, but I survived. As long as someone’s life isn’t at stake, it’s okay to NOT be perfect once in a while.
- Taking a risk to fulfill a dream is better than staying at home and being afraid. Being afraid has zero rewards.
- Even if I bomb, I can still learn something. There is a lot to be learned from failure, as well as success.