The Invasion of the STUFF

I've been fighting it off for a while, but it's overtaking me.  It inches in, bit by bit, piece by piece. Generally it happens in such small increments, I don't even notice.  I am fooled into carrying it in with me.  I have good intentions. And then something happens, and I look around, and realize that I am drowning in CLUTTER. Some of that clutter is pure junk.  Some of it has morphed from important document to garbage.

So I decided to take an embarrassing, painful, self imposed photo tour of my disaster of a house. The end result, hopefully, will be that I determine that there are lots of things that can go.

Bonus Room

The first pictures are taken from just inside the door from/to the garage. My view upon walking in....

To my right are the stairs up to the bonus room.  This is a TV room, the piano room, play room, occasionally the guest room since the couch is a sleeper sofa., and a general storage and clutter room. That stack of stuff is the wood flooring we bought for the house, but cant afford to have it installed.

There is always something on the steps.  The idea is that the next person who goes up will take the item up and  put it away.

Yeah, right.

Breakfast Area

This is taken from the same place, just inside the door from the garage, looking straight ahead to the breakfast area extension of the kitchen.  Funny, we never eat breakfast at that table.  It's where we sit on the rare occassion that we all eat dinner at the same time.

This is first surface one reaches upon walking in the door, so EVERYTHING lands here.   There is a box on the floor at the end of the table that is full of all the miscellaneous cleaning stuff from under the sink , because I need to have someone come look at the garbage disposal. Also, my canner pot thing is there, because I haven't figured out what to do with it.  Our chairs ALWAYS have something hanging on the back of them, or in the seat.  Sometimes it gets knocked down. That's what happened with the laundry basket and t-shirt. The dogs toy is randomly laying on the floor.

In the top left corner of the picutre, you can see the openeing to the living room.

Kitchen

To the left, at 11 o'clock,  is the kitchen.  It's a good kitchen.  The mess is on the low on end for the moment.  At the far end of the bar, there is a pile of mail,  bills, statements, and stuff that for one reason or another I've held on to.   The bright orange booklet is an LMNOP handbook.

On the other end of the bar is the newspapers, more stuff hanging on the chair.  The fridge is covered with artwork and magnets.  We get a magnet from wherever we go -- it's our collectible.  On the left edge of the picture, you see the doorway to the dining room.

The Hooks

Turn 90 degrees to the left and you are staring at this wall that sports a shelf with some hooks.  We put this in before book bags weighed 5000 lbs.  They hung on the hooks so that I could have easy access while cooking dinner.

Laundry Room

Still working from the door from the garage, take one giant step to the left and do a 180, and you are looking down a short hall to the laundry area.  Laundry has overtaken, and is inching out into the hall.

In this same hall there are doors to the right and left.  On the right is the half or guest bath.  On the left is the door to my "second" pantry.  I think it may have originally been a coat closet, but when we moved in, it already had shelves.  I've always stored the extra appliances, like blenders, and mixers and crock-pots in there.  My iron cookware is in there somewhere, as well as art supplies, two EZBake ovens (waste of Santa's good money and sleigh space), art supplies, extra paper products, and other general junk.

Living Room

So now, we walk about 15 feet forward, and look into the living room.  This picture is taken from the breakfast area looking across the room. Today's decorating focal point is the tall ladder, which was needed to change light bulbs in the recessed lighting.  The living room does manage to stay relatively clutter free, because we never live there.  MightyMo watches TV in this room, and since he is the master of his own remote, and watches things like fishing and hunting shows, us girls tend to stay clear.

At the far end of the room are two doorways.  The one to the left is the foyer.  The one to the right leads to three of the bedrooms.

Foyer

The foyer.  This is least used area of our house.  It's the place where you can temporarily put something large and it wont be in anyone's way.  So, I find myself sticking stuff here ALL THE TIME.

For example, there is a small cedar trunk that my mom built for me.  It's lived in BigB's room for 6 years.  We took it the foyer "temporarily" when we painted her room a couple of months ago, and she decided she did not want it to live in her room anymore.  So the foyer is where it has stayed.

In the foreground to the right is the Goodwill Box.   I have learned that I must always have a Goodwill box.  When a child pulls out clothing that has become too small, or that they have decided they hate and will never wear again, the rule is to take it immediately to the Goodwill Box.  If they don't, they leave it laying around in the room, where it eventually ends up in a dirty clothes pile, which I end up washing.  Re-washing clean clothes that my children will never wear again infuriates me worse than just anything else in the world.  I hate laundry.

Other items that are "temporarily" in the foyer:  A cello, that I must return to a friend, so it can live under her piano again, suit cases that need to go to the attic, an air mattress, because I haven't taken time to figure out whether it is the "good" one or the one with a hole in, and my vacuum cleaner, because I am ABOUT to vacuum. 

Dining Room

From the foyer, we take a left and look into the dining room.  This is the most embarrassing of all the rooms, because it has been a mess for the longest.  The mess is actually in layers. starts with the

The gold table cloth was put over another table cloth to protect it when B was finishing a school project last spring.   There is a bag from Hobby Lobby with extra supplies from the project.  There is a box that brought some magic something from UPS... ARGH. There is something else in the box now, but I cannot remember what.  Also in the dining room are boxes of fabric scraps and stuff that were my mother-in-laws.  My father-in-law was cleaning out some things after her death and I wanted her sewing machine.  He decided anything and everything that had to do with sewing needed to accompany the machine to my house. So.... stuff.

Kitchen

And now, we're back, full circle, standing in the door from the dining room that looks into the kitchen.  The pantry door is ALWAYS open. We have a bulletin board attached to the door which holds a calendar, pictures, some bills, school login info, etc.

There is more house, more clutter, but  I'll save that for another day.  If I can get these rooms cleaned up this weekend, I'll have accomplished a ton.