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... of nesting

I think it's finally hit me. My nesting is kicking in with this girl.

We prepared to have a garage sale today that we ended up cancelling last night because we had too much to do still and hadn't even gone through some parts of the house. But it was for the best. We've found a lot more to get rid of and now we just have to go through and price it all (we're over half way there already). So we are aiming for next weekend. Hopefully the stuff will move and we won't just be stuck with it in our garage instead of in our house.

The interesting thing about getting rid of stuff - and I mean really clearing out - is that when you start to pull things out from all of the closets and and cracks and crevices that you had them in, it actually feels more cluttered that when you had more stuff. Because it had just been hidden. I've gotten really good at hiding stuff. It hasn't been until the past week or so of garage sale prepping that I have become aware of certain things like the fact that we own three versions of Scrabble (travel, regular, and deluxe). But when do we play Scrabble? When we are on vacation and find that our hotel has a set. Not at home. Where we have three of them. (We sold our key chain version of it at our last garage sale).

So all of that to say that this has all been really good for me. It's made me realize that all the things that I felt I had to have, I didn't really. And I would save myself a lot of time decluttering and getting ready for garage sales if I just said no to it in the first place. It's a bit ironic that Quinn chose to have his dad make us this wall decal to put up in our kitchen:


But it has been really good for cleaning the house as well. As, room by room, it gets less cluttered, it gets significantly easier to clean and keep clean. Today's project ended up being the laundry room. I say "ended up" because I really started in the work room (which is definitely not a one day project, as evidenced by the fact that this was probably day number five of working on it), but I moved some shelves into the laundry room and then decided that it was high time the whole thing was cleaned and organized.

The laundry room is right by our kitchen, but it's probably the dirtiest room in the house. Not only do we have a litter box in there for the cat, but it just catches all the stuff from traveling through the garage and lint and stuff from dirty clothes and mounds of plastic sacks. The sad thing is that we have to keep the door open for the cat, but you can see it from the living room. It was always so bad, I just never thought anything could be done about it. Enter Pinterest. I really wish I had a before picture. It all got a lot better a few months ago when my dad put cabinet doors on the shelves in there, but today it became a room I don't mind looking at and going to.


This is now what you see from the doorway. I made the calendar awhile ago (also a pinterest inspired idea), but it was on a wall where we never really looked at it. The laundry basket was pulled out further and had all sorts of stuff behind it - including a bag of tennis balls, a tank top I wore once and forgot I had bought, some boxers, a pillow, and a lot of paper sacks. The dustbuster always lived on top of the washer or dryer. Basically, wherever it could be out of the way of the clothing that was folded and put in various piles all over the top of the washer/dryer. So the shelves are meant to be for being able to put folded laundry piles up and out of the way until they are taken to the back of the house.

Anyway. I was very excited to get something done today. We worked on a lot of things today and really did a ton now that I think about it. But the only thing I actually completed was the laundry room. And now, hopefully, this post :)

Quinn did some yard work today, which even he was unable to finish because the lawn mower ran out of gas. Abram really loved being outside with Dada. He walked around the yard out of the way while Quinn trimmed a tree and they pulled up some grass together and did some air tossing.


Overall it was a really good and productive Saturday. Somehow restful and tiring at the same time. Hope yours was good, too!

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