The Never-ending "To Do" List

The more work we do, the worse the house looks! The living room looks great, but everywhere else is in an increasing state of chaos. As of right now, our bedroom and the basement family room are the only safe places in the house. The dining room has been taken over by the living room, the kitchen has overflow from the dining room, the office was never put together before and was always a dumping ground, and the small bedroom has overflow from the office.

I'm seriously starting to think about just throwing everything away.

It seems to me that people today have way too much "stuff". I know I do. There is a lot in this house that I could easily live without. There are a lot of things that I know I wouldn't even miss. We have boxes in the basement that haven't been opened since we've been married. They've moved to two houses and never been opened. It's sad.

Looking at older homes makes me realize how few posessions people had in the '20s and '30s. My old apartment, built in 1902, had one closet. It was a good-sized closet, but still smaller than many closets in new homes. This house has lots of storage by comparison, but we're still cluttered. Part of that is because we never truly got a chance to unpack and organize before we started the living room project. But part of it is simply that we have a lot of junk that is unnecessary. The really bad part is that compared to many people, we don't have that much. For example, we don't have to rent a storage unit for our excess posessions...!!

In addition to taking our house's appearance back to period-authenticity, I hope that we can take parts of our lifestyle back as well. As We peel the accretions off of the house, maybe we can peel the excess off of our life as well, making both our home and our lifestyle more simple and harmonious.