To Hell with the Half-o-meter

The Corner from hell is done.

Just to remind us all where we've been and how far we've come, here is how the corner from hell started:

Here is where it was after our last post:

And here is the corner now:

To the average person, the current state of this corner of our home might still seem a bit disorganized and unkempt, but to us, it is GLORIOUS! I personally feel like we've gained back almost an entire room when I measure in the emotional benefit of knowing there is no longer a portion of our dining room that we've given up on, using it as a painfully visible storage unit/dumpster. And it felt good to throw out most of that stuff, especially the 2 shelves worth of all my course packets and notebooks from undergrad that I kept just in case I might need those notes on the Crusades or that paper I wrote on Lady Macbeth....

We also threw out a ton of pictures, since we have gone from printing every picture we take (what were we thinking?) to keeping most of our photos stored digitally with the exception of printing our favorites to use as decorations. It turns out that despite my previous ambitions, I am not a photo album person, so they went with the stacks of pictures that never found there way into the albums anyway. (Don't worry Jax, I saved the photo albums and a few more little frames for you, since unlike me, you are a talented photographer for whom every picture you take is worth printing :)

On to part two of this post: the half-o-meter was begun, then scrapped, then begun again, and before it could be finished, we realized we were wasting more time than we wanted to writing down everything we were getting rid of and trying to finalize our categories, etc., and we asked ourselves whether we wanted to force ourselves to keep going as we were just for the sake of doing what we said we would do, despite the fact that it became very clear to us that what we said we would do was a stupid idea in the first place. Well, sort of. We still love the idea of getting rid of half our stuff, or even more than half if possible, because the more we go through this process the more we realize that less is more, we were keeping tons of crap we did not need that was just cluttering up our home, stressing us out, and keeping us from living our best lives.

But, we do NOT love, or even like, the idea of logging every item in order to continue to play this game we made up to help motivate ourselves and try to make this more interesting, because it turns out that feeling like we can't get rid of anything without writing it down and assigning it in a category has actually been hindering our getting rid of stuff because if we don't have time to catalog it, we just don't even bother, which is what got us into this mess in the first place.

So, we have decided that out new goal is to simply get rid of anything we don't need or love, and make maintaining our home as easy as possible so that we will actually do it.