We don’t have walk-in closets, or built-in closets, or wall closets, or whatever you call it. The only storage we have in our thousand-square foot home, is behind a curtain along the shorter side of our rectangular house, using up the space below a vaulted ceiling. That’s also where we keep our clothes, and behind them, in clear IKEA bins, is everything else: It’s the toys and clothes our kids have outgrown, but that I want to keep for sentimental reasons, it’s my extra yarn and fabric, my sewing machine, it’s summer clothes and equipment for our kids, a hammock, window screens, equipment and packaging for our maple syrup production, tanned sheep hides that we are selling, summer farm boots and clothes, my summer clothes, three boxes of books, a couple of extra backpacks, the kids’ memory boxes, Christmas stuff, Easter stuff, camping stuff, and things we want to use in our next house, the one with actual rooms for each of us, that we are currently building.
I am exhausted just typing all this out.
For the last couple of weeks, I have felt very unproductive – apart from learning about typewriters – my brain felt messy, I was flustered, and just not very happy. Every time, I went to our bedroom and saw the pile of books, kids’ clothes, and children’s art, I needed to keep safe, I felt my shoulders tighten up. Just like it happens when I step outside into the Upstate New York winter without a jacket. Then we received a box of 16 tanned sheep hides from the tannery. I piled them in stacks, divided into categories of keep, gifts, and sell. All in our bedroom.
Somehow, the whole house felt not right. It seemed again that we had too much stuff everywhere. I felt overwhelmed, even though I didn’t buy that much not even for the Holiday season.
Finally, once it was time to dig out our Christmas decorations, I decided to rearrange our storage. Due to having decluttered so much the last year and a half, a lot of the toats were half full, and the categories were mixed up. On top of that, it was difficult to put things away. For example, the kids had large portfolio folders for their drawings and small boxes for cards and such. I combined all this into large containers for each, easy to access to quickly put things away. I ended up donating quite a few items again, mostly small storage containers that didn’t fit the big concept.
And sudden:
As Dawn, the Minimal Mom would say, I simplified my storage, and it flooded over into the rest of my life. I feel I am having a better grip on my work tasks again, I am more relaxed, the house feels very manageable, and I can concentrate better. It’s almost uncanny, the profound difference it made in every other aspect of my life.