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Making peace with the clutter

Wednesday 11 January 2017


Lets rewind all the way back to the summer holidays last year. I actually wrote this post back then, and forgot to post it, and here I am 6 months later still feeling the same way about my home. & if that's not depressing I don't know what is!

So I guess the summer hols was the starting point. The point where the house tipped the scales from being slightly on the cluttered side to being genuinely uncomfortable to live in. Or maybe its always been that way and it's just that I happened to notice then? (Friends if your reading this..please tell me, has my house always been this bad!? *insert distressed emoji face here*)

The problem is that we just have too much stuff.
(how ungrateful does that make me sound ðŸ˜‚)
There's just garish children's toys in every corner of every room. Everywhere I look. Since Arch has started playing with toys too his collection of teethers, rattles and what not have joined the ranks of Lego, plastic animals and whatever else of Lily's. She currently has a giant barbie castle my parents gave her that takes up almost the entirety of our living room floor for example. So yeah. Every time my children get a new toy my dreams of a spacious and minimalistic style Scandinavian home fade that little bit more. Sigh. Maybe one day when they head off to uni right?

I know I grumble but I actually don't mind having the kids toys around the place. It feels homely and it feels right and if we didn't have toys in the house it would just be plain weird. But at the same time, when every room in the house starts to resemble an exploded playroom (yes even the bathroom) it starts to get to you a little. Every time I step into the house lately I get that overwhelmed feeling and the itching begins. The itching to do a deep clean combined with a massive purge. To be fair me and James have slowly been filtering things to the charity shop the past few weekends but quite frankly it's not enough. In reality though to do a clean/purge to get the house to look the way I genuinely want it to is just not going to happen any time soon. It takes time. So much time. Plus I have two small kids who are at home most of the day. Time is just not something I have right now.
In fact the most my time will stretch to these days is fantasising about chucking half of the kids toy collection out the window whilst I'm cooking tea.

So in order to shake off that overwhelmed feeling I've decided, quite simply, to just make peace with the clutter. Try and make a difference yes, but mostly just accept it for what it is. (for now anyway - when Lily starts school in September I plan to start the house again entirely from scratch. But that's a different story and a series of posts for another month..)

So how am I planning on making peace with the clutter I hear you ask? Well first of all I'm taking a trip to IKEA and stocking up on ALL the storage I can find. Seriously IKEA gimme all the storage! They do nice and surprisingly cheap children's bookshelves so that will be my first port of call for the living room I think. I've been shopping around online for some nice paper storage sacks too and have found some nice ones and the amount they store is great. (these - for anyone interested)

Secondly I'm clearing out the cupboard under the stairs. Our only decent bit of storage in the house and its bursting to the brim with old shoes and rusty old scooters. Once all that's cleared maybe I can start storing some of the kids larger toys in there and switch them around every so often so they still get played with.

Thirdly I've decided I'm no longer apposed to hiding boxes behind the sofa and TV cabinet and anywhere else I can think of. I never did before because I would always know it was there even if no-one else could see but out of sight out of mind is now the way forward! Then when I eventually do get some free time I can start going through it all.

I'm not expecting miracles. But hopefully I can manage to get rid of at least some junk, improve the amount of space marginally and just start to feel more positive on the whole about the place I'm living in.

I'm planning to do a house reno series later on in the year but I might do a before and after with photos soon so I can see the progress in black and white. What do you do with your children's toys in the house? Are you at peace with your clutter?


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