Don’t Be a Slave to Your Stuff

On this cold windy damp day after at least ten days of rain I think I have actually turned into a hermit. I stayed in all day to be with Russ for the few hours he was home before having to fly off for a week of work. Turned out staying in with him meant that I binged watched HGTV home renovation shows like, Love It or List It and The Renovation Brothers.  
After a summer of cleaning out closest and redoing floors I am looking at everything else in my house with a new eye. I called my friend Lane to work on recovering the almost 20 year old furniture in the playroom. Once she and I moved some things around I discovered piles of out grown toys and baskets of dried up markers. The cleaning out never ends.
As I was watching TV shows with young couples buying their first homes I was wishing there was a different home show that gave advice on how you build a house for the today and the future. One couple who were buying their first home in a very expensive neighborhood had to spend over a million dollars to get a small three bedroom house.  
They were in their thirties and childless but had high end tastes. Nothing wrong with any of that. The one thing they did in their renovation that I was practically screaming at the TV about was the wife took one of the spare bedrooms and turned it into a closet. She did ask that the clothing racks be made in a way that when they had children she could turn the room into a nursery.
Wrong, wrong, wrong I thought. If you have so many clothes that a walk in closet does not hold them and you need a whole additional room how are you ever going to have room for a baby? Decide now what you really want to keep and can actually use and sell those beautiful clothes you don’t need while they are still in fashion and have value. It was no wonder to me why this couple still did not own at house at their age since she spent all their money on clothes.
The best lesson I learned from my summer of cleaning is to have a keen eye about what I need to keep and declutter the best I can everyday. This clean way of living carries over to clean eating. 
I still have many rooms, garages and attics that need to have the tornado cleaning treatment, but I figure, one room at a time and maybe I can get the whole house done in twelve months. I should have spent today working on my office rather than needlepointing while I binged watched. I could have seen the same shows, but been more productive. Wait, needlepointing is productive. At least I done use one third of my available bedrooms as a closet.