Thursday, March 15, 2012

Project One A Day : March 2012

Alittle background on this project. My hope is by removing clutter and items in my home which hold no value to me, that my family is able to live a more simple life. We are able to focus on the Lord more, be more grateful for His blessings and to get off the roller coaster of excess that Americans indulge in. I post monthly, sometimes weekly and sometimes daily. How do you like that for well thought out? ;) 


Well this month has been amazing in clutter freeing. I have let go of so many things, I lost count. Pretty sure just in one closet I donated over 30 items. And I am not even half way done. My van is always loaded with donations looking for a good home.

This project also has forced me to look at what I use in my home & wonder if I should be or if there is a better way. One area that keeps coming back is using plastic in the kitchen. It has always bothered me but in a way that was never to the forefront. Now, during this month it has moved to the front of my brain which means if I don't focus on it, I will be dreaming of Ziploc for like forever. Stuck on an uneven board trying to balance is my desire to rid plastic from our home but not to drag home tons of items after purging so much. Obviously I need to use something in place of the ziploc bags in my home, but I don't want clutter. It has been a conundrum. Until it was suggested I use my awesome collection of canning jars. BRILLIANT! And I don't feel bad about thrifting more because they serve multiple uses in my home (i.e. holding my homemade toothpaste, making candles in them, storing food, sorting craft items). Right now, I have no added to my stash.  I vowed to use up what I had first before adding to my collection. Which is hard for me because I am a jump in head first type of girl! I will be making more posts about this in the future.

An area we worked on this month so far has been my daughters closets. They are 10 and 14. For a year they had their own rooms for the first time in their sibling lives. It did not work. We had girls who were more disconnected to each other. So, this past week we moved them back together making the spare room a craft/play/school room. But my word, what these girls collected in a year! 3 days of complete chaos when we merged their rooms. I have pictures but almost scared to show them. Plus I don't know how to take them off my iPhone and put them here. There was about 200 things donated, 50 things tossed because they were beyond repair and tons & tons of paper, junk and SCHTUFF tossed or recycled whenever possible. And we haven't even got to the teenagers make up stash y'all. That one is going to go over like a fart in church, I promise ya. She doesn't wear much or even wear makeup at all often but she likes to own a lot. Ahem. Issues over here, issues. I can tell their room is going to be one that will go into next month getting it pared down.

So those are our areas of progress this month. We also managed to get our trash down to one can a week and upped our recycling to two cans a week. Which made me happy for a whole 3 minutes then I realized I should be buying LESS packaging, therefore creating LESS recycling. Sigh. I can never let myself be happy with anything, I swear. Again, we will be talking more about that in the coming months.

Have you tried to simplify your life this year? Have you got fed up with excess? If so, post in the comment section your story or better yet, your blog so we can be inspired too. You can also follow along on Twitter using the hashtag #SheddingExcess. Let's share and encourage one another! :)

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