When it comes to housework, I’m usually responsible for keeping the place in order. It’s not something that we decided, it just seemed to fall upon me. I know I suck at it; I can do the general tidy things but with the sheer amount of stuff that we have keeping the place looking organised is incredibly difficult. I’ve tended to just play blind to it, and slowly work my way through decluttering it all.
Every time I try to declutter things though, I get roadblocked by Mat. No, he wants that and no I’m not allowed to throw out his magazines. It makes it tough to really make any progress unless I feel like getting into an argument.
Then Sunday, Mat hit the peak of unhappiness with this place, loudly proclaimed it’s too unorganised, and started ripping stuff out. He finally reached a conclusion last night after completely working his way through the room (minus the food cupboard and under the sink). All up, we donated about 4 large bags of things to the Salvation Army: cups, mugs and tons of general stuff laying around the living room. His hat collection has been moved to the bedroom (which is quite plain, we only have basic furniture in there) making a huge difference to the living area. He packed up all our trophies from netball, and moved his car models to the bookshelf (previously they were on the hutch on the computer desk). You can probably sense a theme here, Mat likes to collect stuff.
His Mum had previously given Mat about 100 small collector bottles (old whisky bottles etc) from his grandpa. 100 is probably a conservative guess; they were EVERYWHERE. The bottles have also been packed up and put into storage; good riddance.
Mat took the hutch off the desk, threw it out and repositioned the desk to run alongside the back of our couch, then mounted the microwave on the wall using some shelves we bought about two years ago for that exact purpose. In his final attack, items on the bench were either relocated or donated.
The effect has been tremendous. The room is now much more open and feels less chaotic, a change I can definitely handle. The best thing about it all is that I had hurt my back Friday night (not the good part) so while Mat was doing all of the cleaning and decluttering, I laid on the floor and watched tv.
Oh yeah, who’s a lucky girl?!