Trying To Get Motivated!

I have been decluttering my house this past six or so months and it has been quite a process! My method has been to start at one end of the house and work my way through- with the caveat that once a room is decluttered, I cant put anything else back into that room. Some stuff goes to Good Will or to friends, some gets thrown away (why was I keeping these things?), and some stuff finds an appropriate home in the house. But there is a bunch of stuff that I dont know what to do with yet. It needs a home in my home, but I'll be darned if I know where to make it fit. And so with this group of stuff, I have simply been putting it into the furnace room in the basement, since that is the last room to be decluttered on my list.

Its possible that this was a mistake.

I wont bother to explain. I will just show you what it looks like:

How, you may ask, did I end up with so much stuff? I mean, I am not a hoarder. Its just that this is all the stuff in one concentrated area. But the problem is two-fold. We homeschool. We moved to a house half the size of our old one. That should explain most of it.

If you know homeschoolers, you know that EVERYTHING is a resource. Every cardboard box is a potential diorama, geometry project or sled. In fact I MADE myself throw away a cardboard box the other day that folded into a hexagon... I may still grab that out of the garbage (recycling bin actually) because I just saw on the internet how I can pay a huge amount of money to buy cardboard with creases to educate your child about geometry. So dagnabit! This is free. And educational! And, OK I keep the round cardboard from under the frozen pizza on top of the fridge because you never know when you want to color in a fraction pizza.

And every bit of cloth, wires, batteries, old toothbrushes... We NEED this stuff in order to create found object art. And its pretty much a mortal sin to pass up a good, or even mediocre, nicely priced book.

So yeah...that is how that happens. But I have purged a great deal of stuff. And now I must organize the stuff I have left. (Although I suspect another chunk of what I thought I would keep will still end up at Good Will.)
So I ordered shelving. Big shelving. You see, three years ago, I begged my husband to find it in our budget to gets some shelving. He brought home one shelf. He really did not, and still does not, understand the scope of homeschooling. I ended up with this:

The bottom shelf is half empty because that is where I keep the box of National Geographic magazines that Big Sister dragged to her work area. Both kids get a lot of use out of those magazines. But clearly, this is not enough storage room. So I made a decision and bought more shelving.

And it is here! This whole ordering stuff online and having it come to your door thing is awesome. Especially since it would have taken me three trips with a shopping cart to have purchased these shelves in the first place. Already, the kids have begun using the storage shelf shipping boxes as storage for their math papers. And the cat has commandeered the boxes for his own.

I havent even opened them yet!

So anyway, I have a project ahead of me, which is why I am blogging. Blogging lengthens the procrastination process yet makes it appear as if something constructive is occurring. Love it. Updated pics to appear....whenever.